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last year Buffett donated $169 million to the NoVo Foundation, a charity run by his youngest son, Peter, and Peter’s wife, Jennifer. ... Some of the foundation’s resources are directed towards radical activism that clearly benefits Buffett’s bottom line. In fact, money Buffett donated to the NoVo Foundation has been used to attack companies that compete with Berkshire Hathaway's subsidiaries and holdings. ... In 2017, NoVo donated $3.5 million to the “Clean Clothes Campaign” managed by the liberal Tides Foundation.. ... Why would the NoVo Foundation fund a series of crusades focused on ferociously targeting Walmart and Sam’s Club? It...

NEW YORK - U.S. oil output from seven major shale formations is expected to rise 84,000 barrels per day (bpd) in March to a record of about 8.4 million bpd, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said in a monthly report on Tuesday. The largest change is forecast in the Permian Basin of Texas and New Mexico, where output is expected to climb by 43,000 bpd to a record 4.024 million bpd in March. A shale revolution has helped boost the United States to the position of world's biggest crude oil producer, ahead of Saudi Arabia and Russia. Overall crude production...

State losing millions in state tax revenues with unfilled positions The jobs bubble in North Dakota has grown much larger than has been reported, but no one is certain how much bigger it’s getting to be. Nor has the state done any particular studies on how much revenue it’s losing from the thousands and thousands of positions that are going unfilled, and the activity that isn’t occurring as a result. Jobs in North Dakota tend to trend up and down with oil prices, of course. They can get quite large — like a price bubble — which means they can...

A director at a liberal think tank in Washington, D.C. said on Tuesday that white privilege and white supremacy led to the Energy Transfer oil pipeline project that includes land in North Dakota, and compared it to building a pipeline under Arlington Cemetery and across the Potomac River. […] Phyllis Bennis, director of the Institute for Policy Studies’ New Internationalism Project, first quoted David Archambault, chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux, who has said the pipeline would harm burial grounds and threaten the water of Lake Oahe, the location of a Sioux ancestral site. […] “The equivalent, we might think,...

The Obama administration shocked the oil industry last week, pulling the plug on a major oil pipeline from the Bakken that had become a flashpoint between a pipeline company on the one hand, and a growing coalition of Native American tribes and environmentalists on the other. Everyone was anxiously waiting a Friday ruling from a U.S. federal judge, who was weighing a request from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe to stop construction on the Dakota Access Pipeline, a $3.8 billion 1,168-mile oil pipeline that would run from North Dakota to Iowa and Illinois. The pipeline would threaten sacred lands and...

orth Dakota regulators granted a route permit Wednesday for what will be the largest crude oil pipeline out of the state's fruitful Bakken oil field, leaving Iowa as the only state left to approve the $3.8 billion Dakota Access Pipeline. Public Service Commission members Julie Fedorchak and Brian Kalk voted to grant the permit for Dakota Access LLC, a subsidiary of Dallas-based Energy Transfer Partners, which plans initially to ship up to 450,000 barrels of oil per day on the 1,168-mile pipeline from the Bakken and Three Forks regions in western North Dakota. "This is a massive infrastructure construction project,...

Remember the Keystone XL Pipeline project? Remember what a cause célèbre it was for both the left and right? What the heck ever happened to it? Have you wondered that?Well, in short it was killed pretty much for good, or at least the foreseeable future – both here in the USSA and now in Canada. As you are no doubt aware, it was Obama who, with the left in the federal and various state legislatures – and with some help from Choo-choo Warren Buffet who owns most of the rail cars now hauling crude down south, vetoed the pipeline. And...

Whiting Petroleum announced earnings on February 24, with probably the most bullish and shocking news to come to the oil patch since the crash started in June 2014. It announced that it will not maintain any active rigs in the Bakken shale region in 2016 and also announced production cuts of 15-20 percent and a capital spending reduction of 80 percent. The significance of this is that, contrary to popular belief, the so called breakeven points are not anywhere close to $30 when you take into account cap ex. That should be obvious enough, but the media and many analysts...

New federal data shows that the Energy Department expects drillers in the Permian Basin to push oil production in the shale play above 2 million barrels per day for the first time ever this November. The U.S. Energy Information Administration’s monthly Drilling Productivity Report released Monday, which covers seven of the biggest shale plays in the country, projects production in the Permian to jump by 17,000 bpd this month. That increase would bring the play above the 2 million bpd mark. In December, the EIA expects the play to grow again by 11,000 bpd. But the Permian is one of...

When President Obama announced he was killing the Keystone XL pipeline, he said he was agreeing with the State Department’s assessment that the pipeline from Canada “would not serve the national interests of the United States.” The fact is that it would not have benefitted the personal financial interests of friend and economic mentor, Warren Buffett, who can rest assured that oil from Canada and the nearby Bakken formation in North Dakota will continue to be transported by a railroad he owns. As Investor’s Business Daily noted in a 2011 editorial: Killing the Keystone XL pipeline may help one of...

The performance of Blood & Oil, a soap opera based on the North Dakota oil boom, is not going well. The show saw its episodes trimmed by ABC amid tepid viewer interest. But the real life Bakken is also suffering from a lack of interest, a development that doesn’t bode well for the oil-producing region. The Bakken had been a key part of the U.S. shale boom over the past half-decade. But production peaked at 1.22 million barrels per day in December 2014. Since then production has bounced around, with month-to-month fluctuations, but is slightly down from that high point...

Only 1% of the Bakken Play area is commercial at current oil prices based on my analysis that follows. Only 4% of horizontal wells drilled since 2000 meet the EUR (estimated ultimate recovery) threshold needed to break even at current oil prices, drilling and completion, and operating costs. The leading producing companies evaluated in this study are losing $11 to $38 on each barrel of oil that they produce, the very definition of waste. Although NYMEX prices are about $46 per barrel, realized wellhead prices in the Bakken are only $30 per barrel according to the North Dakota Department of...

Houston-based Occidental Petroleum Corp. is reportedly selling its Bakken shale assets in North Dakota at a steeply discounted price of $500 million to Lime Rock Resources private equity firm in Houston. Reuters broke the story, but Guy Baber of Simmons & Company International wrote Friday that Occidental was shopping the acreage in the fall of 2014 for as much as $3 billion. Occidental was still seeking at least $1 billion this summer, according to Simmons. Both Occidental and Houston-based Lime Rock Resources declined comment, and refused to confirm or deny the reported sale of roughly 300,000 acres. The Simmons note...

Drillers in a few of the biggest shale plays in the country are set to scale back their oil production dramatically next month, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s forecast released Tuesday. The EIA said in its Drilling Productivity Report that overall U.S. oil production would fall 93,000 barrels per day to 5.12 million bpd total in November, the largest decrease recorded in the agency’s data going back to 2007. The drop would also mark the seventh-straight month of production pullbacks. Three of the largest U.S. shale plays — the Eagle Ford, Bakken and Niobrara — together could lose...

For the top U.S. shale plays that once seemed immune to the downturn, persistently low oil prices are starting to take their toll. The lingering crude slump is expected to drive down production next year in the nation’s premiere oil patches — West Texas’ Permian Basin, South Texas’ Eagle Ford and North Dakota’s Bakken shale — as operators spend less to stay within cash flow, according to a report by investment banking firm Tudor Pickering Holt & Co. With oil hovering around $50 per barrel, or less than half the price it fetched last year, output from the so-called Big...

Real estate developers were too late to the party in North Dakota. Just a few years after fracking sparked a shale oil frenzy that lured thousands of unemployed workers to North Dakota in the hopes of landing high-paying jobs, plummeting oil prices have sapped some oomph from the boom. As workers streamed into North Dakota, temporary camps popped up to meet the demand, and real estate developers followed suit with plans to create thousands of permanent apartments. Related: The North Dakota Boom That’s Going Bust After Oil’s Plunge But crude oil prices have fallen more than 50 percent in the...

The lowest crude prices in six years might not be enough to put the brakes on the U.S. energy renaissance. Some parts of North Dakota’s Bakken shale play are profitable at less than $30 a barrel as companies tap bigger wells and benefit from lower drilling costs, according to a Bloomberg Intelligence analysis. That’s less than half the level of some estimates when the oil rout began last year. The lower bar for profitability is one reason why U.S. oil production has remained near a 40-year high even as crude prices fell more than 50 percent over the past year...

Yesterday's Drilling Productivity Report from the EIA better defines the inflection point many in the industry have been waiting for since late-last year. US tight oil production is rolling over, and EIA sees the decline accelerating. We believe the relationship between the US rig count and US oil production is the most critical in O&G today, for it is the cornerstone of most global trough/recovery scenarios. By next month, all of the 2015 production gains will be given up per the EIA, and, at this pace, all of 2014's gains (some 1.1mmbpd) could be wiped away by mid-2016. Of course,...

The federal forecast of U.S. shale production is sinking again for the third month in a row, but the decline is still just a thin layer off the top. Daily oil production at the nation’s six biggest shale plays is set to slip by 91,000 barrels from June to July, the Energy Information Administration says. That’s roughly 2 percent of the 5.48 million U.S. barrels anticipated next month, hardly the kind of decline oil-industry stakeholders had expected for after drillers sidelined nearly 1,000 oil-drilling rigs in the last six and a half months. “It’s a pretty resilient industry,” said Bill...

Bakken production will keep growing, albeit at a slower pace, and the Eagle Ford still has running room within high-return portions of the play, according to a recent analysis by Wood Mackenzie. The Bakken and Eagle Ford together produce just over 2.5 million barrels per day of oil, or nearly two-thirds of U.S. tight oil production. Higher oil prices in the 2013 to 2014 timeframe spurred operators to drill not only in the core of the Williston Basin, but in the fringe and speculative areas. This included areas along the Montana-North Dakota border, the northern most part of the play...