By JOHN P. TRETBAR
Crude futures prices were mixed in morning trading Tuesday, with the Nymex benchmark contract up eleven cents and London Brent down a penny.
Kansas Common crude at CHS in McPherson was down a dollar and a quarter Monday to $28.50/barrel.
The Energy Information Administration says gasoline demand in March fell by 13% to its lowest level since January of 2000. From February to March, gasoline demand fell by 1.2 million barrels per day. Jet-fuel demand fell 15%, its largest monthly change since records began in 1965.
Energy operators filed just 39 intent-do-drill notices during the month of May, 238 so far this year. Current totals from the Kansas Corporation Commission are up slightly from a month ago, but are still down significantly from last year at this time, when there were more than 400 on file. There's one new intent to file in Barton County, and four in Ellis County.
The national drilling rig count is down 17 to 284 active drilling rigs, according to the weekly report from Baker Hughes. The count in Texas is down 12. New Mexico is down three. Independent Oil & Gas Service reports its weekly Rig Count in Kansas is unchanged, with just four rigs drilling in Western Kansas, and none in the eastern half of the state.
Independent Oil & Gas Service reports 24 new wells completed across Kansas last week, nine in eastern Kansas and 15 west of Wichita, including one in Barton County. Operators in the state have completed 423 wells so far this year, compared to 670 at this time last year. Regulators approved just nine permits for drilling at new locations across the state last week, 197 so far this year.
U.S. crude-oil production dropped again last week. The government says domestic output averaged 11.18 million [["eleven point one eight million"]] barrels per day for the week ending May 29. That's down more than 230-thousand barrels per day from the week before, and down more than a million barrels a day from a year ago.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration reported a more than two million barrel decline in U.S. crude stockpiles last week. At more than 532 million barrels, current inventories are about 12% above the five-year seasonal average.
EIA reported a drop in imports as well, down one million barrels per day for the week ending May 29. The agency's four-week average for imports is down more than 18% from the same period a year ago.
The Energy Information Administration reported on U.S. crude-oil production through March of this year, with Kansas operators managing to pump more than 86-thousand barrels per day. That's down from a year ago, when the state managed nearly 92-thousand barrels per day. National production totaled about 12.7 million barrels per day.
Saudi Arabia and Russia agreed to a preliminary deal to extend existing oil output cuts by one month. Reuters reports the agreement would also raise pressure on other OPEC-Plus producers with poor compliance to deepen their cuts.