We'll look back on the Railroad Commission election this fall as voters making their call on how we want our kid's future to be. https://boereport.com/2024/04/30/texas-operators-turn-to-flaring-amid-weak-gas-prices/ Basically most of the new production in some of these places from the wells that were completed earlier this year is going up in smoke. It isn't being "shut in" like a faucet so it can be turned back on next year when the LNG terminals go online. This year has been a lesson in what comes before the phrase "weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth". That'll be next year.

The Wall Street Journal has an article this weekend about the tremors in the Basin. It's interesting they say that people are worried that the water will flow to the surface, and don't mention that it already has.

And so it begins - if you were wondering what the government could do to push down oil prices without the SPR or a way to get OPEC+ to say they'll boost production.......the EIA has no way of knowing what production in either one of those basins will really be, but they'll be watching how the market reacts to this to see if it works.

https://blog.gorozen.com/blog/is-us-oil-production-surging Great post by Goehring and Rozencwajg again - reinforcing the idea that all US oil basins have basically rolled over = production > 50% of estimated available reserves. This article goes into their version of the EIA "adjustment" math and predicts we could be down 1 million b/d by on crude production by year end 2024. I'm not on board with this whole "under reporting" of production issue they're writing about here. Producers in Texas at least divide what comes out of the ground into 3 buckets - crude oil, condensate, and gas. I have no idea what they tell the EIA every month and since the EIA apparently doesn't audit it and royalty, working interest owners and the Texas University Fund don't collect their checks based on it I don't really care. It's fairly well known that condensate will find its way into a crude tank somewhere if it can meet the vapor pressure specs. Due to how the gas gathering systems are set up and the need for producers to quit allowing light ends to "weather off" in trucks and tanks, a bit more liquid is collected at compressor stations and gas plants. This "bit" is mostly butanes and pentanes. These will also get blended into crude, again if they meet the vapor pressure ceiling limit. Keep in mind that condensate blending is nothing new at all and should be in the numbers marked "crude and condensate" in the EIA reports. The NGLs left in the gas after all this wringing out in the field go into a separate system designed to handle high pressure liquids and mostly heads to Central Kansas, East Houston, or Corpus Christi. Contrary to some reports, the pieces that come out of them generally do NOT find their way back into the so-called crude oil stream. I've pulled the numbers for liquids production reported by compressor stations and gas plants in Texas, and although quite a few of them don't bother to report, the volumes from the ones who do don't add up to anywhere near the 700k barrels of "adjustment" we hear about in the EIA numbers as what they need to close their bookkeeping gap. Bottom line of all this - it appears to me that at least some of the barrels that we think are crude are really condensate and NGLs, which aren't worth nearly as much as actual oil. So that "BOE" people keep talking about is increasingly made up of lower value hydrocarbons. Gas in the Permian today has risen in value to almost breaken - ($.015)/Mmbtu before gathering, treating, and processing fees. Yee-haw! You're much better off selling it as ethane if you can get it in the line. So it can go over the dock to India and China.