Category: notable posts

(NY Times) When the Obama administration unveiled a proposal in January 2015 to open the southeastern Atlantic coast to oil and gas drilling for the first time, environmental advocates were shocked and enraged — and the oil industry was delighted.

The emotions were the same, just on opposite sides of the energy-environmental divide, when the Interior Department announced Tuesday that the administration was yanking Atlantic drilling off the table. And almost everyone was shocked.

(Bloomberg) The upturn in U.S. core inflation and rise in oil prices are causing money to pour into a trade that was one of Wall Street’s favorites heading into 2016, according to Société Générale SA.

Late in 2015, strategists at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., and Morgan Stanley—to name a few—were pounding the table on Treasury inflation-protected securities, based on the belief that market-based measures of price pressures over the medium term were far too subdued.

(oilprice.com) The North American Baker Hughes Rig Count came out Friday. The decline continues. Baker Hughes gives an oil and gas breakout for every basin and state with five years of historical data. Baker Hughes has twenty eight and one half years of historical data for total U.S. rigs but only five years for individual basins. Gas rigs peaked in August 2008 at 1,606 rigs, over six years before the peak in Oil rigs. On February, 26, gas total U.S. gas rig count stood at 102, a decline of over 93 percent. A closer look at the total U.S. total rig count.

October 10, 2014 1,609 rigs
February 26, 2016 400 rigs
Percent decline 75 percent

(Forbes) Oil prices should fall, possibly hard, in coming weeks. That is because fundamentals do not support the present price.

Prices should fall to around $30 once the empty nature of an OPEC-plus-Russia production freeze is understood. A return to the grim reality of over-supply and the weakness of the world economy could push prices well into the $20s.