Trent Telenko

D-Day, June 6th 1944, Plus 72 Years

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To commemorate D-Day, here is a current view of Omaha Beach from Wikipedia —

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omaha_Beach#/media/File:Omaha_Beach_Nowadays.jpg

And here are a pair of columns I’ve written previously on D-Day in 2014 and 2013.

This is a review of three very good books on D-Day —

History Friday — Books to Read for the D-Day 70th Anniversary
6th June 2014

And this column is about the sacrifices of British Royal Air Force early warning radar unit, the 1st Echelon of 21 Base Defence Sector, that landed at the Les Moulins Draw, on Omaha Beach, Normandy about 5:30pm on 6 June 1944.

Royal Air Force at Omaha Beach
6th June 2013

An Eye Witness Report from the 6-2-2016 Trump Rally in San Jose

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This is from Trump event attendee Karen Powers:

As a Trump supporter, I was there, in San Jose, attending the Trump event on June 2.
 
The Trump event attendees were forced to walk past the protesters afterward, after the event was over, to get to their cars. Broad areas of sidewalks and streets, that were not blockaded before the event started, were blockaded by barriers after the event ended, and standing in front of those barriers were lines of individual police officers telling Trump event attendees what route to follow to get to their vehicles.
 
I had parked in a parking garage right next door to the event. Before the event, an easy walk to the event, after event over, had to square 4 blocks of sidewalk lined with protesters who somehow knew the exact route that Trump supporters/event attendees had to walk, and were waiting for them.
 
Frankly, it was pretty obvious that either law enforcement personnel or the mayors office, someone in the know, had told the protesters where the Trump supporters would be forced to walk after the event. Attendees only went where law enforcement officers told them to go in order to get to our cars. We followed their instructions. The protesters knew, seemed well informed, of the direction where Trump supporters were going to be heading even before we exited the event, and protesters lined that walking route as a result, literally laying in wait where no law enforcement was present.
 
There was an intent to force the supporters and protesters together. There was no intent to keep them apart.
 
Trump supporters exiting the event were literally set up like rats in a maze, forced to follow a prescribed set of boundaries, which led directly to the protesters and not away from them.
 
The press got their story but the clash was completely avoidable. It was created by intention and by design.

Let’s be really clear about the implications of this report. These rioters were acting as an official arm of the Democratic Party controlled San Jose city government in suppressing the civil rights of Americans. The presidential election in November 2016 is no longer about “Trump” or “Hillary”.

It is about whether we will retain American political freedom.

Frack-Log…ACTIVATED!

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In my two previous blog posts here and here I talked of a new extended flow oil fracking technique coming on-line that resulted in a lot of drilled uncompleted wells (DUC) and the population of such wells (~5,000). In the comment section of one of those columns I speculated that we have a top end on oil prices where “turn on a dime fracking” will cut in at a price point of $50 a barrel

We now have a “flaming datum” for that speculation, oil having just bumped -HARD- into the $50 a barrel roof for world oil prices. The 5,000 DUC Frack-log is being activated with — I strongly suspect — the new extended play oil fracking technique.

It is being reported in various places that the US rig count jumped from NINE RIGS in mid-May to 325 last week and there was no change from 325 rigs this week. That is a 36 fold increase in rig count in a week!!

Based on figures I’ve gotten from those in the industry, the range of production you can expect from those wells, depending on the geology, length of the laterals (6,000 to 8,000 feet) and the number of fracking stages (200′, 300′ or 400′) will result in initial barrel per day production of between 400 and 800 barrels a day per fracked well (with a very, very rare 1,300 barrel a day play from time to time). So we are looking at between 130,000 to 260,000 barrels a day of American oil fracking production arriving in the next few months.

Compared to Saudi production, 130,000 to 260,000 barrels of oil a day represents between 1.3% and 2.5% of the Saudis’ daily oil flow. The number of DUCs activated to provide that production amount to 6.5% of the frack-log. And all that for what amounts to Zero “CAPEX” (capital expenditure), plus the operating expenses of worker wages, the rental price for existing, out of service, oil fracking rigs, and oil tanker trucks to move product to rail heads or oil pipelines.

Now you know why the Saudis didn’t agree with OPEC oil production cutbacks this week. The Saudis maxing out their oil production is no longer about stopping American oil frackers. The Saudis’ long term regime survival strategy amounts to being the “Last Petro-State Standing.”

The Saudis — like everyone else inside the Big Oil economic paradigm — simply cannot compete with that sort of rapid to market, low cost & low risk oil. The Saudis’ highest priority now is to keep their customers as long as they can, because if they lose them they may never get them back.

When Texas DUCs Go Quack, Quack, Frack

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The “DUC” in this case being _D_rilled but _U_n_C_ompleted shale oil & gas wells

I ran into this article by Seeking Alpha energy analyst Gary Bourgeault over on Real Clear Energy which gave a figure for how many drilled but ‘unfracked’ wells are available for the new extended oil flow fracking technique I mentioned in May 15th 2016 post Texas Fracking and the Death of Big Oil.

The key passage from “U.S. Shale Oil Boom Over Says CSMonitor – Hahahahaha” below —

DUC wells waiting in the wings
 
Another major reason the shale boom isn’t over is the large number of drilled but uncompleted wells waiting to be brought into production. There is an estimated 5,000 in the U.S. which can be quickly brought to market when the price of oil is high enough to reward it. Some companies have been completing them for some time, and more are being completed in 2016.

There are a lot of implications in that number. Starting with the fact that new oil & gas rig counts are going to be minimal for some time. And the hard economic fact that major politically event driven oil price spikes are going to be extremely short and will drop below 50 dollars a barrel within weeks to three months, given how fast these North American “DUC” wells can be fracked to bring product to market.

This new age of “banked” cheap oil plays, and the resultant oil price stability, will see off both the “Big Oil” economic model and the political/corporate elites that live by it.

Update May 27 2016:

It looks like Zerohedge has come to the same set of conclusions about the “Big Oil” economic model with his post “Peak Petro-State – The Oil World In Chaos”

Texas Fracking and the Death of Big Oil

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It isn’t often you see the death of a major worldwide industry. Last week I saw the death of the “Big Oil” economic model. It just died at the hands of Texas oil frackers who have developed a new “disruptive technology” that has made obsolete all the pillars of technology underpinning large, vertically integrated oil companies. More importantly, the same is true of all the petro-states that nationalized Big Oil’s assets in the 1960s to make all the state oil companies around the world today.

I found this out doing my day job last week as a Defense Department quality auditor visiting a mid-sized oil service company diversifying into federal contracts. The meeting was about issues with the contract they won and touched on others they have bid on. As a side bar at lunch the following points about their main business came up:

1. Oil field spending has died. Rig count in the USA is the lowest it has been since 1940.
 
2. One oil rig controller company these folks worked with saw a year over year drop of 72% in its business.
 
3. Another company they supplied had their “Cap-X” budget drop from ~$400 million for 2015-2016 to little over $30 million for 2016-2017.
 
4. One drilling company they supplied went from 120(+) new wells last year to _12_ this year.
 
5. This supplier sold a lot of copper tubing for “frack-log” drilling. That is the drilling of holes in good oil-bearing rock without fracking rock for oil immediately — and here is the new part — to take advantage of a new long-flow fracking technique.

While most of the points above are due to the Saudis’ oil price war on Texas frackers. An ex-Big Oil geologist I know put it this way —

The entire reason for the price drop was because the Saudis wanted to destroy fracking in the United States in order to keep us dependent upon them in order to keep them getting a free defense. The Saudis will have to diversify and start spending money on defense before the price goes back up, or they will be in serious trouble.

The technique in Point #5 above marks another “fracking revolution” that is of growing importance to the USA. This new fracking energy revolution will upend the world order as we know it. Political winds willing, America may well be a net hydrocarbon exporter in five to eight years.

Explaining why that is requires some background in Texas oil fracking.

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