Two Nice MRO Wells On A 3-Well Pad Come Off-Line -- No Obvious Reason For The Wells To Come Off-Line -- January 14, 2019

Two wells:

• 16778, 354, MRO, Jack Pennington 21-28H, Reunion Bay, t8/08; cum 518K 11/18 with a huge jump in production in 5/17;
• 17502, 637, MRO, Mark Sandstrom 14-32H, Reunion Bay, t12/08; cum 514K 11/18 with a huge jump in production back in 8/14; perhaps a slight uptick in 10/18;

Neighboring wells:

Meanwhile, in that general area, two nice MRO wells are off line and I don't see any specific neighboring activity that would account for two wells on this 3-well pad to be off line. Note the first one is IA:

• 27152, IA/2,253, MRO, Cloon 14-32H, Reunion Bay, t8/14; cum 319K 11/18; off-line;
  
• 27151, 2,208, MRO, Glisar 14-32TFH, Reunion Bay, 8/14; cum 232K 11/18; off-line;
• The third well on that 3-well pad shows a slight uptick in production, but not much:
• 27555, 1,922, MRO, Keith 44-31TFH, Reunion Bay, t8/14; cum 249K 11/18; remains on line.

Maybe I'm looking at the wrong wells.

Let's look at the APIs for #27151 (API: 33-061-02852) and #27152 (API: 33-061-02853). Nope, nothing over at FracFocus.

Sundry forms:

• 27151: nothing.
• 27152: nothing.

Will follow up in a couple of months.

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No Comment

Link here.

T+69 -- Day 24 Of The Partial Government Shutdown -- Dems Are In Puerto Rico -- Trump Is In DC -- Waiting -- January 14, 2019

Director's Cut: should be released tomorrow, Tuesday, January 15, 2019, 3:00 p.m. CT. 

The Super-Secure Quantum Cable Hiding in the Holland Tunnel. Link here.

Fossils. We're not talking about members of the US Senate. North Dakota may have the bones of the largest triceratops ever discovered. Barnes County, in the southeastern corner of the state is a long way from the valley of the dinosaurs in northeastern Montana, Hell Creek, famous for its T. rex skeletons.

Does Wisconsin have a "death penalty"? From wiki: Capital punishment in Wisconsin was abolished in 1853. Wisconsin was one of the earliest United States states to abolish the death penalty, and is the only state that has performed only one execution in its history. Fifty years from now, google Jayme Closs.

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Sucking All The Oxygen Out Of The Room

After looking at the graphic, note who is not even on the graphic:

• Beto
• Oprah
• Bernie
• Pocahontas
• and, the biggest name of all not on the list: Hillary!

This has to be very, very concerning for "mainstream" (and I use the term loosely) Democrats.

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The Literary Page

The Great Gatsby trivia never ends. Ms Corrigan has enough to last a lifetime in So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came To Be and Why It Endures, Maureen Corrigan, c. 2014.

One aspect of The Great Gatsby: hard-boiled.

At the beginning of the Baz Luhrmann movie, Nick talks about Jay Gatsby.

And what does Nick talk about with his precious breaths? He tells a story about his friend Jay Gatsby, who was a fellow soldier in World War I. As I've said, the modern use of the term hard-boiled came out of that war, and in almost every classic hard-boiled story, the most stable and intense relationship is not between the hero and the woman he loves, but between two men, comrades in arms. 

The 1949 Gatsby movie stresses the buddy element running through the story by surrounding Ladd's Gatsby with gangster underlings who had served with him in the Great War.

Hard-boiled novels and the noirs that were made from them are male buddy stories that explore what makes a man a man in a newly fallen world.

I find that very, very interesting, Corrigan continues:

Fitzgerald knew that he had created a story in which the primary relationship was between two men. 

Writing to H. L. Mencken in a letter dated May 4, 1925, Fitzgerald, in his typically spelling-challenged style, confessed that "the influence on it has been the masculine one of The Brothers Karamazof (sic) a thing of incomparable form, rather than the femineine (sic) one of The Portrait of a Lady. 

When Gatsy turned out to be a commercial failure, Fitzgerald quickly came to believe that he had "paid" for making Nick and Gatsy the focus of his novel. In a letter to Maxwell Perkins dated April 24, 1925, Fitzgerald bemoans weak sales and blames the title, which he says is "only fair, rather bad than good ... And most important -- the book contains no important woman character and women controll (sic) the fiction market at present.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was also a story in which the primary relationship was between two men. It's too bad Corrigan missed that one. 

Saudi Arabian Oil Reserves -- What It Means -- Bloomberg -- January 14, 2019

Bloomberg op-ed: the new assessment of Saudi Arabia's reserves. For the third graph, regarding Venezuela, throw out Venezuela's heavy oil and Venezuela is #8 on the list.

Three graphs:

Throw out Venezuela's heavy oil and Venezuela is #8 on the list. 

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A Most Distinguished Group

From Robert F. Bacher's short biography of Robert Oppenheimer, 1904 - 1967.
From pp 12+:

Fortunately several small groups that had been working on problems associated with the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago could be closed down now, and, if the personnel involved could be persuaded, might form a nucleus of a staff for Los Alamos.

Robert (Oppenheimer) was very persuasive. The largest number came from Princeton where Robert Wilson with a small group had been working on an alternative electromagnetic method of isotope separation.

Others came from Berkeley, Illinois, Cornell, Minnesota, Purdue, Chicago, and Wisconsin.

Robert (Oppenheimer) attracted a very strong theoretical group centered around those who had worked with him during the summer of 1942 and including Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, Victor Weisskoff, Emil Konopinski, Robert Serber, George Placzek, Robert Marshak, Robert Christy, and Richard Feynman.

It was an outstanding group.

The Summer of '42, Michel Legrand

Talk about brilliant (and fortuitous) casting. Barbra Streisand headed the list; Jennifer O'Neill was selected. I can't even imagine Streisand in that role.

Bruin Reports A Huge Bakken Well -- January 14, 2019

See first comment with regard to the size of these wells.

Bruin reports a huge well (again):

• 31775, 3,193, Bruin, Fort Berthold 151-94-26B-35-15H, Three Forks, API: 33-053-07184, 12 million gallons of water; 87% water by mass, 55 stages; 14.6 million lbs, t8/18; cum 156K 11/18; Antelope-Sanish. For background, see this post.

Pool	Date	Days	BBLS Oil	Runs	BBLS Water	MCF Prod	MCF Sold	Vent/Flare
SANISH	11-2018	30	44405	44422	66530	67002	43193	23464
SANISH	10-2018	31	40293	40105	78884	62116	40721	21200
SANISH	9-2018	2	2345	2240	3612	2968	1603	1352
SANISH	8-2018	30	62854	63370	83442	50095	39587	10338
SANISH	7-2018	6	5721	5205	20304	3340	609	2715

Right now, these are the three exciting operators in the Bakken:

• MRO re-fracks, particularly in Bailey oil field
• Bruin's huge six-month IPs, the Fort Berthold wells in Antelope-Sanish
• NOG as a proxy for the Bakken

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.

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The Literary Page

Wow, what a treasure! It's not (yet) behind a paywall. An essay on The Great Gatsby by Christopher Hitchens in the May, 2000, issue of Vanity Fair. Link here. The final paragraph:

Fitzgerald’s work captures the evaporating memory of the American Eden while connecting it to the advent of the New World of smartness and thuggery and corruption. It was his rite of passage; it is our bridge to the time before “dreams” were slogans. He wanted to call it Among the Ashheaps and Millionaires—thank heaven that his editor, Maxwell Perkins, talked him out of it. It was nearly entitled just plain Gatsby. It remains “the great” because it confronts the defeat of youth and beauty and idealism, and finds the defeat unbearable, and then turns to face the defeat unflinchingly. With The Great Gatsby, American letters grew up.

It's too bad Christopher Hitchens is no longer with us. It's worse that journalists can't connect these great works of literature with current events.

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Pancake Heaven -- Taos, New Mexico

Not Rocket Science At All -- January 14, 2019

Presidential tweet: "Dems in Puerto Rico as shutdown hits day 24."

They must be reading the blog: EIA tweets the status of ISO New England this morning. 

Groningen: later this week, January 17, 2019, a Dutch court will rule on whether natural gas production from this field should be halted.

Saudi Arabia: from John Kemp this morning --

Something puzzles me reading the news (as a bear of very little brain) Saudi Arabia short of cash and borrowing on international capital markets Revenues insufficient to meet budget commitments At the same time, multiple stories about the country investing overseas I'm confused.

Confused: Saudi will be a net importer of oil in less than twenty years. The "movers and shakers" tell us that the price of oil will not recover; the future is in renewable energy. Saudi Arabia sees the writing on the wall. The kingdom has no choice but to invest overseas. Not confusing at all. And if you don't have enough cash flow / revenues to meet budget commitments, there's not much choice but to borrow. This is not rocket science.

Rhetorical: I'm sure John was making a rhetorical comment, or he had not yet had his first morning cup of coffee.

Air conditioning: this is Saudi's problem. This article is nonsense, but this is what "movers and shakers" are telling Saudi Arabia. From oilprice:

As the earth gets hotter, energy demand will increase significantly along with global temperatures. Now a team of researchers in China has determined in a recent study that by the end of this century, peak energy demand in China will increase by a minimum of 72 percent. For every degree Celsius that the global mean surface temperature (GMST) increases, average Chinese residential energy use is projected to raise 9 percent, while peak electricity use will increase 36 percent per degree Celsius.

It is projected that the mean surface temperature of the earth will be 2-5 C hotter by 2099. Calculating based off of current consumption patterns in China, this means that the most conservative estimates show average Chinese residential electricity demand would rise by 18 percent. At the high end, average Chinese residential electricity demand would rise by a whopping 55 percent. Meanwhile peak usage, on the low end, would increase by at least 72 percent.

These findings will have major implications for energy grid planning and other infrastructure in China, where energy use has already been booming thanks to a rapidly expanding middle class. As Chinese incomes increase, even without the added impact of climate change, the electricity consumption of the average Chinese household is expected to double by 2040.

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The Wall Street Journal Headlines

The news today:

• PG&E prepares for bankruptcy. Just one of many headaches the new governor will face
• After sparking at least 1,500 California fires, PG&E faces collapse
• Apple rattled markets with China warning. Who's next?
• Shutdown pinches economic growth: let's see -- a small segment of US government employees and contractors have gone two days without paychecks and we're already seeing an effect on economic growth? What's wrong with that picture?
• Denise Mueller-Korenek shattered land-speed bicycle record: 184 mph. Data points:
  
  • WSJ video now, but I'm sure it will be on YouTube soon, if it's not already
• Bonneville Salt Flats
• no toe clips
• previous record? 1995, Fred Rompelberg, 167 mph 
• Shea Holbrook: pace car driver
• main sponsor? KHS -- I have to check; I think I have one or two KHS bikes
• two chains
• video looks like something out of Hunter S Thompson's / Johnny Depp's Fear and Loating
• in fact, in one scene, a timing official appears to be channeling Hunter S Thompson
• Fred Rompelberg Bicycle Holidays, Mallorca: sponsor of the pace car
• I did not see any EVs in the video
• a flat tire at 175 mph would be a disaster
• two-mile board: 157 mph
• three-mile board: 163
• 176.633
• wow, almost out of control
• pretty incredible
• ticker tape -- 186 on the last mile?
• came back in a Toyota pickup -- I was hoping for a Nissan Titan
• so, what's next? 200 mph?