By JOHN P. TRETBAR
Eagle Media
Kansas Common crude at CHS starts the week at $68.25 per barrel after dropping 75 cents on Friday. Prices in McPherson are up more than six dollars since the first of the year. Prices in New York on Monday drop another two percent from Friday's close. Near month WTI drops below $77. London Brent was fetching $80 per barrel.
Kansas regulators okayed 13 new drilling locations statewide. Of those, 12 are in western Kansas including one in Stafford County.
Independent Oil and Gas Service reports 45 new well completions last week, including 22 east of Wichita, and 23 in the western half of the state. Barton County reports six new well completions.
The Kansas Rig Count from Independent Oil and Gas Service is 17, with seven rigs east of Wichita, down one, and ten in western Kansas, which is unchanged from a week earlier. The tally is down more than 48% from a month ago and down more than 51% from a year ago.
Drilling was underway Friday on leases in Ellis and Stafford counties.
Baker Hughes reports a U.S. rig count of 580, down two oil rigs and two gas rigs. The breakout for horizontal rigs was down seven rigs. The tally in North Dakota is down by four rigs.
Cold, consolidation, and wildfires are skewing production statistics in North Dakota.
The number three crude-producing state last week reported output over 1.2 million barrels a day for the month of November, up eleven percent from the month before. The spike comes on the heels of a lull in October brought on by raging wildfires, according to the state's Department of Mineral Resources.
Natural gas production rose 1.4% and the gas-capture rate returned to 95% after a brief downturn the month before. But current operations and output are taking a pounding from frigid temperatures. Reuters reports the state's production today is down more than 12 percent due to extreme cold weather and related operational challenges.
The oil patch in The Lone Star State boasts record production totals, pumping nearly half of the national crude-oil tally. They also set records for taxes and royalties, paving a lot of roads, and paying for a lot of tuition. The industry shelled out a record over $27 billion in taxes and royalties last year.
The state's biggest trade group, the Texas Oil and Gas Association, says they beat the previous record by over a billion dollars. TXOGA president Todd Staples calls it the direct result of "...policy, partnerships and perseverance.”
The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) says crude production dropped below 13.5 million barrels a day last week for the first time since late November. Current output is 13,481,000 barrels per day. Four-week average output remains above 13.5 million.
In a new forecast, EIA expects output to top 13.5 million for the entire year this year, and surpass13.6 million barrels per day next year.
The Energy Department adds half a million barrels to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. That's nearly 39 million barrels in the last year at refill prices $15 cheaper that what we sold it for. The government says commercial crude inventories dropped by two million barrels to 412.7 million. EIA reports stockpiles are about six percent below the five-year seasonal average.
We import more crude-oil than we export by more than two million barrels a day.
The Energy Information Administration reports domestic crude imports dropped by 304-thousand barrels a day to 6.1 million. The four-week average is down 3.3% from a year ago. EIA reports crude imports are down 1.3 million daily barrels from a year ago, and 700,ooo less than two years ago.
Exports average four million barrels a day, down a million from a year ago, but up 200,000 barrels a day from the same week two years ago.