By JOHN P. TRETBAR
Eagle Communications
Crude prices continue their losing streak. The near-month Nymex contract for light sweet crude dropped below $74 for the first time in two weeks. London Brent fell below $79 by lunchtime Monday.
Kansas Common closed out the month of November at $66.25 per barrel at CHS in McPherson. The average price for the month is a fraction below $67.60 per barrel ($67.592) , a five month low. That's down nearly eight dollars from October, and about seven dollars less than the average in November of last year. Prices in McPherson dropped another two dollars on Friday to start the week at $64.25 per barrel.
Regulators report 100 new intent-to-drill notices across the state last month. That's 1,288 so far this year, down more than 300 from a year ago. A search of the Kansas Corporation Commission Web site returns five new intents in Barton County, six in Ellis County, and three in Russell County.
The weekly Rotary Rig Count from Baker Hughes on Friday was up five oil rigs and down one gas rig for a total of 625 active drilling rigs nationwide. The count in Texas was up three rigs over the week before.
The Kansas Rig Count from Independent Oil & Gas Service is down three in eastern Kansas to 16 active rigs. The tally west of Wichita dropped by one rig to 23. The weekly total is down more than nine percent from last week.
Independent Oil and Gas Service reports 38 newly-completed wells since last week. There were four in Ellis County, out of 29 in Western Kansas. That's 1,589 so far this year, or about 124 more completions than at this point last year.
Kansas regulators okayed 16 new drilling locations across the state, with nine in western Kansas including one in Russell County.
U.S. Crude production reached another all-time high last week, marking the fifth weekly tally this year to break the record. The Energy Information Administration reports domestic operators pumped of 13,239,000 barrels of crude oil per day, an increase of 25,000 barrels per day from a week earlier, and more than a million barrels a day greater than the same week a year ago.
Energy Information Administration reported a 1.6 million barrel increase in U.S. crude inventories. The total rose to 449.7 million barrels as of November 24, which is slightly higher than the five-year average for this time of year.
The government says imports averaged 5.8 million barrels per day, down nearly 700-thousand barrels per day. Average imports over the last four weeks are less than one percent higher than during the same four weeks last year.
More output cuts are on the way from the OPEC-Plus oil exporters. Saudi Arabia will reportedly continue its voluntary million-barrel reductions and the group's other members are promising to chip in with more voluntary cuts totaling another million barrels per day.
Some of the biggest players in the Permian Basin, including Occidental Petroleum, Concho Resources, and Diamondback Energy, have come out against a proposed nuclear waste facility in southeast New Mexico. The companies signed on to a letter from the Permian Basin Coalition to oppose the temporary storage facility proposed by Holtec International. The letter by U.S. Senior Senator Martin Heinrich argues against moving the nation's nuclear waste to the proposed temporary facility before a permanent facility is approved.