Author: Stu

Weekly Rig Report: Baker Hughes Flat at 588, WellDatabase at 601 After a North Dakota Reclass, Enverus Still Running Higher

The three major U.S. rig tallies are telling the same structural story and three different weekly headlines. Baker Hughes held unchanged at 588 for a second straight week. WellDatabase printed 601, down 30 week over week but up 23 year over year. Enverus’s GPS-based daily count continues to run well above both weekly censuses, last […]

The backlash is real, bipartisan, and already killing projects

Data Centers Done Right are a good thing – Done Wrong and we get problems. This is not a fringe NIMBY story. Polling flipped with unusual speed. A March 2026 Gallup survey found 71 percent of Americans opposed a data center in their area, including 48 percent who were strongly opposed — higher than opposition […]

Pain at the pump may linger due to global refining capacity.

Crude is still moving out of the U.S. Gulf Coast, but the bottleneck is no longer just barrels of oil. It is the world’s ability to turn those barrels into gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel—and to deliver the finished products where they are needed. Labor Day weekend is supposed to mark the seasonal turn lower […]

The U.S.–Venezuela oil deal does more than reroute barrels. Its second-order effects strike at the heart of China’s two-decade oil-for-loan model in Caracas: who controls production, who prices the crude, who books the cargoes, and who decides whether Beijing ever gets repaid.

President Donald Trump’s late-August 2026 arrangement with North American Blue Energy Partners (NABEP) grants the company 100-year rights over 17 fields in Lake Maracaibo and the Orinoco Belt, holding an estimated 65 billion barrels—about one-fifth of Venezuela’s proven reserves. NABEP plans as much as $100 billion in infrastructure investment. The U.S. government receives rights to […]

Beyond Coal? India, Indonesia, and Vietnam Didn’t Get the Memo. Should Someone Tell Michael Bloomberg That Coal Is Not Quite Dead Yet?

Michael Bloomberg has poured more than $1 billion into campaigns to retire coal plants in the United States and globally. In 2019, his philanthropies committed $500 million to the Beyond Carbon effort. In 2021, he launched a drive to close a quarter of the world’s remaining coal plants and cancel all proposed ones by 2025. […]

Mike Wirth framed Chevron’s new $7 billion Venezuela commitment as a “win-win-win” during a Bloomberg Television interview from Caracas: better heavy crude for U.S. Gulf Coast refiners, stronger energy security, and fresh investment and jobs for Venezuela.

The September 2, 2026 sit-down with Tyler Kendall came the same day Chevron announced updated joint-venture agreements with PDVSA. The company will invest more than $7 billion over five years across three existing ventures, add acreage in the Orinoco Belt’s Carabobo area, and target more than 600,000 barrels per day of production—more than triple the […]

The Jones Act – Its Impact on Downstream with Colin Grabow, Cato Institute

This is a Joint Podcast with David Blackmon, and Stu Turley on both podcast platforms. The Jones Act: America’s Self-Inflicted Economic Wound In this episode of the Energy Newsbeat Podcast, hosts Stu Turley and David Blackmon sit down with Colin Grabow, Associate Director of the Cato Institute’s Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies, […]

The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve is no longer a deep cushion

After coordinated IEA releases during the Iran war and earlier drawdowns that were never fully replaced, SPR crude sits at 286.6 million barrels as of the EIA week ending August 28, 2026 — about 40% of authorized 714-million-barrel capacity and the lowest level since the early 1980s. That level already sits inside the band most […]

Chinese refiners are paying record premiums for Russian ESPO crude as cheap sanctioned barrels from Iran dry up and Venezuelan oil moves onto the open market.

November-loading ESPO from Kozmino is trading at more than $7 per barrel over Brent, with some offers to independent refiners reaching $10, according to traders cited by Bloomberg and OilPrice.com. That is a sharp reversal from the deep discounts China extracted for years. ESPO loads on Russia’s Pacific coast and reaches Chinese ports in less […]

Diversified Energy is buying Elliott-backed Birch Permian Holdings for about $1.8 billion, its largest deal in 25 years, and using Carlyle-backed asset-backed securities to scale a PDP platform in the Midland Basin without a large equity raise.

The transaction, announced September 2, 2026, is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026, subject to customary conditions and a $50 million break fee. It expands Diversified Energy Company (NYSE/LSE: DEC) from a multi-basin PDP consolidator into a scaled, operated Permian producer with integrated midstream and water infrastructure. Deal structureGross purchase price is […]