Depletion allowance is an oft misunderstood tax deduction that accrues not only to oil companies but to the individual royalty owner. Did you know it applies to timber and other minerals as well? It is, in fact, virtually the only deduction that the mineral owner has. Sadly, it is mischaracterized as a “tax loophole” for the rich oil… Read More »

$50 is not the new $100/bbl. The pundits are claiming that costs are now so low that if the price of oil gets above $60, drilling in the shales will resume and drive prices back down. I don’t think so. First many drillers and rigs are down for the count as when they reach bottom, they have more… Read More »

As a budding geologist, I worked a “driller’s graveyard”. Today we call it Fayetteville Shale. It was the eastern part of the Arkoma Basin and adjacent Mississippian Embayment or Reelfoot Rift. The Fayetteville plunges deeper into the basin, filling a pre-Mississippian trench created and becoming a far different formation. To date no one has found significant amounts of… Read More »

In the mid-1980’s, having survived the slower 1981-82 downturn, and watching Iran and Iraq duke it out, the oil business was in limbo over $20-25 a barrel oil. But once Iran and Iraq agreed to stop because they were hurting themselves, everyone thought these companies would have little incentive to continue dumping supply on the market. They were… Read More »

Once again, I endure listening to CNBC talking heads who don’t know their butt from a hole in the ground about drilling, fracking OR earthquakes, trying to explain to people about something they have nary a clue. It makes me want to rip my XM radio out of the dash and throw out the window. To wit, they… Read More »

The 900 # gorilla in the room for Oklahoma is the earthquake problem. Many geologists are making the case that shallow injection has not been an issue. Nor has fracking itself cause earthquakes. But injection, although on vacuum and not applying any over-pressures, into deep Arbuckle formations are a source of seismic activity. The state has forced even… Read More »

With the supply of oil even higher than last spring, the recent price rally makes little sense. It is a hope for things unseen, and basically, unobtainable. The impetus is the notion that production is going to decline. So far it hasn’t. There is no economic justification for a single rig to be running in the U. S.… Read More »

Wow…what to think. Would Aubrey McClendon be so convinced he was going to jail that he would have committed suicide? That may not be the case. OKC folks I know, many with long histories with McClendon and Chesapeake Energy say that the charges against him were hokie. They basically revolve around companies who had joint operating ventures (thus… Read More »

Last week, briefly, a rig appeared in South Arkansas and drilled a well with a single bit. Smoked it down in three days or so. It was the one and only well being drilled in the state and apparently the only operating rig in the entire month for the state. That has to be a record that surely… Read More »

Investopedia defines “Barrel of Oil Equivalent (BOE) as the amount of energy that is equivalent to the amount of energy found in a barrel of crude oil. There are 42 gallons in one barrel of oil, which will contain approximately 5.8 million British Thermal Units (MBtus) or 1,700 kilowatt hours (kWh). (The use of BBOE is the same… Read More »