Wow, wow, wow! Wednesday! September 7, 2022!
APPLE Day.
Noon.
By the way, the weekly API petroleum data will be out today; the EIA data will be delayed until tomorrow due to the Monday holiday.
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Back to the Bakken
The Far Side: link here.
WTI: $86.97.
Natural gas: $7.989. US natural gas is effectively being banned from export. Not all of it, just enough. Absolutely fascinating.
Active rigs: 43.
Wednesday, September 7, 2022: 8 for the month, 58 for the quarter, 397 for the year
- 38006, conf, Hess, CA-E Burdick-155-95-2932H-5, Capa, t--; cum 61K 7/22;
- 37371, conf, Petro-Hunt, Jorgenson 158-94-2B-11-1HS, East Tioga,
RBN Energy: really? We need more oil? Is Alaskan crude oil production on the verge of bouncing back?
The renewed focus on energy security — and the acknowledgment that
the world will continue to rely on hydrocarbons for decades to come —
may be breathing new life into an often-overlooked U.S. production area:
Alaska’s North Slope. The state’s crude oil output is down to its
lowest level since before the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS) came
online in 1977. But now federal regulators are moving toward final
approval for ConocoPhillips’s $8 billion Willow project in the National
Petroleum Reserve, and Australia’s Santos Ltd. and Spain’s Repsol have
taken a final investment decision (FID) on the $2.6 billion first phase
of their Pikka project between Willow and Prudhoe Bay. In today’s RBN
blog, we discuss recent hydrocarbon-related developments in America’s
Last Frontier.
It’s been a tough few years —
some would say decades — for producers in the 49th state. Back in the
1970s and ’80s, Alaska was seen as the next big thing for U.S. crude oil
production. With the completion of the 800-mile TAPS pipeline from
Prudhoe Bay to Valdez, AK, in 1977, Alaska North Slope (ANS) production
took off, and by 1988, when Alaska’s output peaked at more than 2 MMb/d,
the state not only accounted for one-quarter of total U.S. crude oil
output (blue layer in Figure 1), but it also briefly knocked Texas off
its perch as the #1 oil-producing state. Alaskan oil didn’t give the
U.S. “energy independence” –– a rallying cry in the Ford, Carter and
Reagan years –– but it sure helped.