11/14/17

Is Peak Permian Only 3 Years Away?

The world’s hottest shale basin, the Permian, is leading the second U.S. wave of tight oil production growth and will continue to do so for years to come, all analysts say.

However, signs have started to emerge that the relentless intensification of drilling leads to diminishing returns, Simon Flowers, Chairman and Chief Analyst at Wood Mackenzie, said in an article this week. Pumping twice as much sand as usual into Permian wells and drilling longer laterals doesn’t deliver commensurate volumes of oil, Flowers notes.

“Drilling costs rise exponentially with depth, and there’s a suspicion that longer wells are hitting a cost efficiency ceiling,” WoodMac’s chief analyst writes.

Moreover, after the early production-exuberance stage, drillers are now much more focused on delivering profits and higher profit margins. They now favor quality over quantity, and value over volumes.

“Might the Permian be reaching the limits of well size and design? Maybe—as Star Trek’s Scotty might observe of an underwhelming high intensity completion ‘you cannae change the laws of physics, Jim’,” Flowers says. But WoodMac suggests that drillers could ‘change the laws of physics’ and that these signs of setbacks may actually be growing pains.

The energy consultancy’s Director of L48 Research, Rob Clarke, argues that there are two basic and very sound reasons that the fading lateral drilling and proppant metrics might be just growing pains. One is much more advanced proppant placement, and the other is the oil majors’ move into the Permian, set to change things.

“Now, pinpoint frac technology can place the proppant exactly where it’s wanted. Science is also being applied to identify the most effective proppant grain size and shape as well as drill bit design and fluid chemistry, all with the aim of boosting EUR,” according to WoodMac.

In addition, ExxonMobil significantly boosted its Permian position earlier this year, and Exxon has “global expertise in extra-long laterals—including a 39,000 footer in Russia,” WoodMac says.

ExxonMobil has already drilled a 12,500-foot well in the Permian and “will no doubt ramp up longer still to test the diminishing returns theory,” Clarke noted.

Now the next challenge will be to deliver an effective completion of such a long well.

“The application of the Majors’ capital and industrial approach will test whether the thousands of wells to be drilled in the future enable the Permian to deliver on the bold growth targets,” WoodMac said.

Two months ago, Wood Mackenzie warned that as drillers are set to continuously develop the hottest U.S. shale play, they may soon start to test the region’s geological limits. And if E&P companies can’t overcome the geological constraints with tech breakthroughs, Permian production could peak in 2021, putting more than 1.5 million bpd of future production in question, and potentially significantly influencing oil prices.

Apart from geological constraints, other factors that could affect Permian growth are increasing service costs and potentially persistently low oil prices.

While oil service margins have increased for oil field service providers such Schlumberger and Halliburton, oil producers, on the other hand, face cost pressure, and “higher well costs may force additional discussion on capital discipline going into 2018, which could be a good thing for the overall supply and demand balance,” BTU Analytics said earlier this month.

At the end of September, Moody’s warned that even if average drilling and completion costs have declined significantly in the past two years, “drillers will be hard pressed to further reduce drill-bit finding and development costs, since drilling efficiencies may be offset by higher service costs.” North American oil producers will need WTI at over $50 a barrel in order to achieve “meaningful capital efficiency”, Moody’s said.

Pioneer Natural Resources, for example, continues to believe in the Permian, but it thinks that the U.S. shale patch is heading toward hitting the ceiling of efficiency gains from larger frackings.

“In the U.S., we are essentially using a sledgehammer approach. We are using larger volumes or sand and fluids and pumping at higher rates,” Pioneer’s CEO Tim Dove said at the Oil & Money conference in London, as quoted by Platts.

“At some point you reach a peak on logistics, limits on sand, water volumes… that’s where we are getting to, [although] we’re not quite there as an industry,” Dove noted.

Still, the expertise of the majors, as well as science and tech breakthroughs in proppant use, may help the Permian outgrow its growing pains faster than expected.

Link to original article: https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Is-Peak-Permian-Only-3-Years-Away.html

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

11/14/17

CAIR shutting down free speech

By: James Simpson | Bomb Throwers

We are at a tipping point in our society.

Either we fight to survive or surrender to the forces of anarchy and despotism. In collusion with Islamic supremacists, the Left has gone to the mats to bring down our nation in an unholy alliance we call the Red-Green Axis. If they win, it spells the end for our republic. And while we have gotten something of a break from their destructive designs with the election of Donald Trump as president, they are doing everything possible to keep America in the dark and intimidate us into silence.

I have seen this up close and personal over the past few days. Last week I traveled to locations in the Midwest to speak on that issue. I was accompanied by Phil Haney, a Department of Homeland Security founding employee who was investigated by the Obama administration because he identified a large number of Islamic terrorists hiding in plain sight inside the U.S. Yes, he was investigated by the very agency that tasked him to do this job. That is the level of insanity we confront today.

On Tuesday we got the news that a booking at a venue we were scheduled to speak at in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, next week was cancelled when an organization named South Dakota Voices for Peace called and threatened the venue. They bragged about this in a press release:

The History Club of Sioux Falls has cancelled two events scheduled to take place at the historic venue: “Sioux Falls Immigration Question: Follow the $$$ with featured speaker Ron Branstner” scheduled for 10/26 and “Philip Haney and James Simpson 11/4.” All speakers have been identified as spreading misinformation about Islam, Muslims, refugees, immigrants and the refugee resettlement process.

We spoke Saturday at another venue in Illinois. Our hosts were threatened but did not back down. The restaurant where the event was to be held was contacted and told to cancel the event. Restaurant management responded that they do not take sides and would not cancel. The organizer of the event said she was also personally threatened and calls were made to her employer as well.

If this is not a demonstration of the Islamists’ Nazi mindset I don’t know what is. A few of them appeared at the venue, but had to sign an agreement before entering that they would not attempt to disrupt the meeting. Instead they attempted to commandeer the meeting by droning on with long statements of opinion, asking repeated questions, and objecting to our answers.

I tried to find the South Dakota Voices for Peace press release online, but the website, www.southdakotavoicesforpeace.org, is listed as “for sale” on the GoDaddy web hosting site. A Google search found a Facebook site, but when accessed it returns an error message: “The link you followed may be broken, or the page may have been removed.”

The organization seems to have disappeared. This is typical of these shady groups. The day the event was cancelled, the release was available and someone sent me a screen shot, shown below.

The South Dakota lawyer who threatened the History Club is Taneeka Islam, formerly Civil Rights Director for CAIR-Minnesota. She does have a website for her law practice.

CAIR posted its own announcement about the cancellation of Branstner’s presentation on its Facebook page. It was silent, however on the cancellation of our presentation, probably because CAIR does not want people discovering what we have to say.

CAIR is an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing case, which led to the largest successful terrorism financing trial in U.S. history. CAIR only remains unindicted today because Obama was elected and shut down the investigation. CAIR is also a front group for the Islamic terrorist organization HAMAS, and is a member organization of the Muslim Brotherhood – another Islamic terrorist organization from which almost all others have sprung.

CAIR and its proponents are engaging in their own form of terrorism here in the U.S. But there are dozens of other Muslim Brotherhood front groups in America. CAIR is only the most visible. All of these organizations aggressively attack anyone who criticizes or questions any aspect of what they do. Meanwhile, university campuses across the country have become a virulent hotbed of overt anti-Semitism as the direct result of actions by the Muslim Students’ Association, another MB front.

Ironically, the same day as the South Dakota event, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions gave a speech at the Heritage Foundation, decrying efforts to suppress free speech and our need to defend it. He said, in part:

We must above all vigorously defend the inalienable rights that are part of our heritage and especially religious liberty and freedom of speech. These are the very first freedoms the Founders put in the Bill of Rights—and not by accident. They are first because our freedom to worship and to speak our minds are at the core of what it means to be free.

Our Founders believed that reason is the best means to truth and justice. Reason requires discourse and, frequently, argument. The Father of our Constitution, James Madison, said, in protest of the Alien and Sedition Acts—the speech codes of his day—that freedom of speech is “the only effectual guardian of every other right.

Certainly not all Muslims are violent or even agree with what these groups do, but primed with oceans of money from Saudi Arabia and domestic left-wing funders like George Soros, the groups have become agents-provocateur in a ceaseless battle to dominate the narrative and shut down free speech when it exposes them for what they are. Let’s hope Attorney General Sessions puts his words into action.

What CAIR and others are doing is called “tortious interference.” It can be viewed as a form of economic warfare. A problem we face is that too many public officials let them get away with it or even side with them. Those people need to be removed from office and the Muslim Brotherhood’s aggressive efforts must be met with determined opposition.

11/14/17

Who Wrote the Roy Moore Dossier?

By: Cliff Kincaid | America’s Survival

The so-called Trump Dossier, financed by the Hillary campaign and provided by the KGB through a former British intelligence agent, has fizzled out. It has been supplanted by the Moore Dossier, concocted by Washington Post reporters working for their billionaire owner, P.T Barnum-like Jeff Bezos. This variation of the ploy, with a new target, seems to have legs. Many Republicans and conservatives are falling for it.

But is there really any reason to believe the Moore Dossier has any more validity than the Trump Dossier?

A big red flag appeared when feminist attorney Gloria Allred raised her head in the Roy Moore case. Suddenly another accuser surfaces, under suspicious circumstances, and even “conservative” Republicans are running for the hills. It stinks.

Why do the liberals need the Southern Poverty Law Center when Republicans will pin “guilty as charged” labels on conservatives?

Look at Colorado Republican Senator Cory Gardner and the rest. Senate Republicans are so scared of being charged with a “war on women” that they have decided to wage war, with no moral or legal basis, on the GOP Senate candidate in Alabama. They deny him due process and have accepted unverified claims of sexual harassment against him. Some are threatening to expel him from the Senate if he wins.

No wonder these Senators can’t get anything done. They are too busy posing for the cameras and looking politically correct. Why don’t they just put on dresses and pretend to be feminists? Perhaps this will win them the transgender vote.

The Washington Post, the source of the charges, is a partisan Democratic paper which thinks billionaire hedge fund operator and Democratic Party money bags George Soros is a blessing for America. It said so in an editorial. Yet this paper is dictating what Republicans should be saying and doing in the Moore case.

The Post hates morality and traditional values. Its religion columnist, Washington insider and party giver Sally Quinn, believed in the occult and admits casting hexes on her enemies.

The Washington Post once published a Pulitzer Prize-winning story about a child heroin addict that turned out to be a total lie. Google the name “Janet Cooke.” Her editor was Watergate reporter Bob Woodward. Perhaps she used a Ouija board to write her stories.

Referring to the Post’s initial story, legal expert and commentator Gualberto Garcia Jones says, “The obvious question is who informed The Washington Post of the allegations? And who located the women and put them in touch with Washington Post reporters?” He adds, “It is simply impossible to believe that their simultaneous allegations happened organically after nearly 40 years of silence.”

The follow-up accusations, fed to the media by Gloria Allred, make the whole thing even more questionable.

Garcia Jones writes, “The Washington Post’s political motivations to destroy the reputation of Judge Roy Moore are evident and the tactics used against him uncannily resemble those used against President Donald Trump. A month before the presidential election of 2016, The Washington Post published accusations of sexual misconduct against candidate Donald Trump while endorsing his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.”

Yes, indeed, why not probe the motives of the paper that helped usher Barack Hussein Obama into the presidency and has been working to destroy the Trump presidency? The Post had endorsed Moore’s opponent while working on the hit piece against Moore. The same modus operandi was evident in the Trump case.

It didn’t work with Trump but it looks like it could work with Moore. Which means that if they destroy Moore, they will return to undermining Trump, probably with new sex charges. Or perhaps they will try something else. The new Janet Cookes at the paper are probably working on that right now.

We’re heard the mantra about frightened women scared to take on a powerful man with sex charges. But Moore has been powerful for decades in Alabama. Only now they decide to come forward, when Moore is leading in the polls and about to become a Senator on the national stage?

What’s surprising is the reaction of Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz, whose father was charged with being involved in the assassination of President Kennedy. Cruz says, in the case of Roy Moore, that “as long as these allegations remain unrefuted,” Cruz is “not able to urge the people of Alabama to support his candidacy.” How does one refute charges from decades ago, for which there is no evidence in the first place? You would think Cruz would have more sympathy for Moore, considering that Cruz’s father was unfairly targeted with the JFK allegations. How is Moore supposed to “refute” the charges against him? Go back in time in a time machine to take pictures?

Cruz, a lawyer, says Moore “needs to come forward with strong, persuasive rebuttal demonstrating” that the charges are untrue. I am not a lawyer, but since when does the accused have to prove his innocence about charges from decades ago concerning his dating habits? I thought the burden of proof was on the accusers.

Do Moore’s accusers have anything other than a signature on a high school yearbook? So far, they rely on claims, accusations, and charges. These are easy to make. Tears can be faked. All of this is supposed to carry more weight than his decades of service to the cause of traditional values and God-given rights?

Garcia Jones says, “It should come as no surprise that people like the editors of National Review and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would publicly convict Judge Roy Moore in less than 12 hours solely on one article published by a politically partisan publication.”

True. It’s no surprise. These are cowardly “conservatives” and Republicans. In McConnell’s case, he’s actually an enemy of Moore, having supported one of his Republican opponents in the primary race.

Why does McConnell fear Moore? As Garcia Jones told me in a phone interview, Moore is a doer, not just a talker. Moore actually gets things done. Because of that, he has made real enemies, such as those in the Southern Poverty Law Center. Moore can be expected to actually force conservatives in the Senate to do something about the issues we face as a nation. He will embarrass McConnell & Company.

Moore would be more than justified, if he wins the Senate seat in the face of this bipartisan assault, to go to Washington and fight to get his reputation back. Let Moore challenge his accusers, in and out of the liberal media and the Republican Party, to produce the evidence against him. Let’s get to the bottom of this.