Nikki Says, “Just a Flesh Wound!”

Nikki “The Black Knight” Haley refuses to give way and heads to Michigan for another thumping. [The Rude Awakening] February 28, 2024 [WEBSITE]( | [UNSUBSCRIBE]( Nikki Says, “Just a Flesh Wound!” [Sean Ring] SEAN RING Monty Python and the Holy Grail is one of the funniest movies ever made if you like British humour (appropriately spelled with an “o.”) Or if you like smoking weed while you watch movies instead of inhaling popcorn. There’s [one hilarious scene]( where Graham Chapman’s King Arthur travels across England and must cross a bridge. Guarding that bridge is The Black Knight. King Arthur had just witnessed The Black Knight murder his opponent and tried to recruit him. After his overtures fail, the King tries to pass The Black Knight, but the knight won’t let him pass. So they engage in the most ridiculous dual in movie history. First, King Arthur slashes off The Black Knight’s left arm. ‘Tis but a scratch…. Next, Arthur cuts off his right arm. Then Arthur sinks to his knees to thank God for victory, only for the now-armless Black Knight to boot him in the head! Incredulous, the good King says, “Look, you stupid bastard! You’ve got no arms left!” Just a flesh wound! The exasperated King says, “I’ll have your leg!” and cuts off The Black Knight’s right leg. And then his left leg! As the now-armless and legless knight is on the ground, he says, “Alright, we’ll call it a draw.” The King rides off over the bridge with his man, Patsy. It’s a perfectly ridiculous bit of hilarity… and it reminds me of Nikki Haley and Donald Trump. A Special Kind of Person Nikki Haley hasn’t just been losing. She’s been getting her head handed to her in every vote. In Nevada, she lost to “none of these candidates.” For God’s sake, can someone hit the damn gong? Apparently not. Haley’s playing a game she can only win if the Republican party loses. Let’s face it: Donald J. Trump is a big government nationalist. His hero is Reagan. And though Ronald Reagan claimed to be for “small government,” he’s the president who initially allowed Congress to blow out US government debt. At this point in history, the US citizenry doesn’t want to take the punch bowl away. And who can blame them? Once everyone admits the game is over, the stock market and 401(k) plans will tank. It’ll be a bitter reckoning. With Trump back in office, it’ll feel a bit better. He’s unapologetically patriotic, loves low interest rates, and doesn’t care about the national debt. As long as he doesn’t repeat his late-term mistakes of shutting the country down, letting the left wing control the narrative, and cutting interest rates too deeply, Trump should be ok. Haley is a mixed bag. Essentially, she’s a RINO. Most of the votes she gets in “Republican” primaries are from Democrats in states where the primaries are open to all to vote in. That she’s still running despite taking such a beating means she’s waiting for Trump to be removed from the race. But Haley has other problems. ⬇️ [Watch New Video From James Altucher]( ⬇️ [Click here to learn more]( [Click here to learn more]( [Click Here To Learn More]( High Infidelity Allegations of Haley’s infidelity to her husband surfaced in the UK’s [Daily Mail]( and were splattered across the X-verse. But because the US MSM refuses to report on it, it doesn’t appear in the usual nighttime news discourse. It seems the MSM is shielding her because she’s a RINO, preferable to both Trump and Biden. Haley says she won’t run as a Democrat, but that remains to be seen, especially if Biden falls down the stairs hard soon. Whether the infidelity rumors are true or not, she’ll have a helluva time getting votes from 2A, ex-military, military, or Bible-thumping conservatives. There’s nothing worse for a soldier to come home to than a straying wife (actual or alleged). It’s why she can’t grab a decent hold of the electorate. “But Trump was a serial adulterer!” you say? Almost certainly. But the voters don’t seem to care. After Trump crushed her in her home state of South Carolina, Zero Hedge’s headline read, “[Koch Brothers Pull Out Of Haley After South Carolina Skewering]( Ouch. Praying For Judicial Intervention Though the Koch Brothers have lost faith in Haley - along with most of her other donors - she’s banking on a verdict that will block Trump from running for the presidency. I honestly can’t see how he’ll be stopped or even how he’ll pay any of the ridiculous fines the courts have ordered. When you’ve got [Grant Cardone pulling his real estate business out of NYC]( and [Kevin O’Leary publicly defending Trump]( NYC has the problem, not Trump. I imagine she’ll go up to Michigan, lose a limb (figuratively, of course), and then roll on, if only supported by the few donors left with TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome). Wrap Up Trump should wrap up the nomination soon enough. Whether Biden appears on the Democratic ballot remains to be seen. My colleague Jim Rickards thinks it’ll be Michelle Obama. But it would be fascinating to see what Haley would do if the Democrats courted her. There’s no real difference between their positions on the issues. Would Haley desert the party? Almost certainly. Would the Dems ask her? I’d put nothing past them, especially since Clinton, Harris, and Rice are such losers. Let’s see. All the best, [Sean Ring] Sean Ring Editor, Rude Awakening X (formerly Twitter): [@seaniechaos]( In Case You Missed It… King: Fracking 101 [Sean Ring] SEAN RING Today, my good friend and frequent Rude contributor Byron King is taking us on a field trip. We’re heading to Colorado, where Byron will take us through his Fracking 101 course. Enjoy and I’ll see you tomorrow! All the best, [Sean Ring] Sean Ring Editor, Rude Awakening X (formerly Twitter): [@seaniechaos]( [URGENT: Regarding Your 2024 Strategic Intelligence Membership Dues!]( Hi, I’m Matt Insley. I’m the Publisher at Paradigm Press. Just moments ago, I just got off the phone with Jim and we agreed: it’s time we start charging more money for access to his newsletter. That’s why we may implement a massive price hike for all subscribers in the coming days. But if you [click here now,]( you can lock in your current subscription price at 80% off – and never have to pay the potential new price of $500. Don’t waste any time. [Just click here now to claim this special offer.]( [Click Here To Learn More]( A Field Trip to Colorado: Fracking 101 Nobody can squeeze 6,000 feet down a drill pipe to look at an oil-bearing rock formation. Plus, it’s dark at the bottom of an oil well and hard to see anything. A while back, though, I had a chance to do the next best thing to being there. In fact, I found myself up close and personal next to one of the hottest, most prolific “tight oil” shale plays in the country. I placed my hands directly onto oil-bearing strata. I could see and smell the petroleum. Indeed, I held the gooey goop in my fingers: [Shale] Gooey, oil-rich shale in your editor’s hand. BWK photo. If you’re curious, it smells a lot like money — both money going down the hole and money coming back out. Problem and opportunity, in other words. There’s plenty to discuss here. Because what I was doing out in the field was not nearly as simple as just picking up rocks off the ground. In fact, I was visiting nothing less than a combination of geological marvel and industrial-technological miracle. Of course, there’s huge money tied up in all of this too, and I mean trillions of dollars. No typo: trillions. Let’s dig in… Today, we’ll take a field trip to the high plains of Colorado, northwest of Denver. The adventure was pre-Covid, when I visited a major drilling and oil-producing operation run by the former Noble Energy Corp., which was acquired in July 2020 by Chevron (CVX: NYSE). Here’s how it unfolded. Noble (and for clarity, I’ll call it “Noble” even though it’s now Chevron) sponsored a field trip to one of its major operations. I paid my own way to Denver and paid for the hotel and incidentals. Noble supplied a bus and several outstanding geologists to narrate the tour. Over the course of a long day, we went to several geological sites and kicked rocks. We also visited drilling and production sites to see development and oil handling operations. Broadly, the purpose of all this was to learn more about fracking, the process of drilling a well, pressurizing the hole and fracturing (“fracking”) the rock to release oil and gas. Along these lines, it’s fair to say that most people have never been close to a drilling rig or oil operation, particularly politicians and policymakers (and it shows). Most of what people think they know about oil operations comes from reading a book, from news articles or watching television or such. It’s also fair to say that most people don’t know much or understand even the basics of fracking. So the idea behind my field trip (and of this discussion today) is to take a look at real oil operations and learn a few things. After that, you can draw your own conclusions. Begin with a map that shows a geological feature called the Denver-Julesburg Basin (DJB), which underlies eastern Colorado, western Nebraska, etc. And there’s a site in the DJB called the Wattenberg Field, a major oil production area. [Map of usa] The key to Noble’s project was control over vast acreage in this DJB region. In particular, there are prime locales nicknamed “sweet spots,” mostly within a rock formation called the Niobrara Shale, which underlies much of the Great Plains of the U.S. and Canada. This Niobrara feature is a hydrocarbon-rich rock formation laid down long ago in Cretaceous time, 99 million to 65 million years ago. It formed in what geologists call the Western Interior Seaway; and here’s another map of the ancient dimensions, to give you an idea. [Map of usa and canadas great plains under water] Long ago, the U.S. and Canada Great Plains were underwater. Courtesy Niobrara News. [( The good news for geologists is that Niobrara outcrops at the surface, adjacent to the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, just north of Denver. And that’s where our Noble geologist-guides began the field trip, at a limestone quarry operated by Cemex (CX: NYSE), the large, international cement-maker. In other words, the point of visiting the Cemex quarry was to see rocks exposed at the surface, particularly the entire thickness of Niobrara. This alone helps to understand why this oil play is such a remarkable energy asset. Basically, when Niobrara was laid down long ago, the ocean mud and ooze were filled with ancient sea life from fish in the water to microbes in the muck. When they died, they were buried under layers of fine sediment, much of it clay which is why we have shale. Over the past 65 million years, the remains of these buried critters chemically transformed into oil and gas within the rock, although one can still find a few fossils here and there. [Fossil Clam] Fossil clam shell in Niobrara Shale. BWK photo. Meanwhile, just beneath the Niobrara is an older, dense rock formation called the Fort Hayes Limestone. That’s what Cemex quarries and grinds up for lime, with which to make cement. The geological layout is that, pre-Niobrara, the Fort Hays Limestone subsided and became the foundation, so to speak, for subsequent shale deposition. One thing follows another, right? Here’s a photo of several members of our field trip standing atop Fort Hayes, which plunges downward rather steeply toward the east, away from the mountain range. [limestone] Standing on plunging limestone; Niobrara Shale above. BWK photo. In the photo below, as you look out over the quarry, you’ll see literally the entire thickness of Niobrara, nearly 400 feet at this locale. Cemex removes all this shale just to get to the underlying limestone, which says something about the value of limestone used for cement-making. And as this photo shows, there are massive, energy-intensive, earth-shifting operations involved in all of this. [Shale removal to get close to the limestone] Cemex blasts and removes Niobrara shale to get to the underlying limestone. BWK photo. More of interest to oil-finders, as opposed to cement-makers, is that the Cemex quarry exposes four key layers of Niobrara, labeled A, B, C, and D. The Niobrara formation also has a couple of other lower zones, called Codell and Greenhorn. Way over east — about 30 miles or so, near Greely, Colo. — these rocks are buried 6,000 feet deep under many younger layers of rock. And this rock is what drill bits penetrate to make oil and gas wells. Here’s a schematic to help you visualize things. [Frack chart] The idea is to drill directional wells into Niobrara Shale; and then frack it for oil. Source: Naturalgasintel. That’s the basic geology. You have a hydrocarbon-rich shale atop a sturdy limestone bed underneath. It’s all uplifted, in the sense that the surface is well over 4,000 feet in elevation. But in the DJB the underlying rocks are not heavily folded, faulted, or fractured by natural processes. Now let’s move on to what the Noble reps explained about their wells when we visited actual drilling and production operations, east of that Cemex quarry and out in the Greely area. A typical well drilled into the Niobrara goes down about 6,000 feet from the surface and then about 5,000 feet outwards or “laterally;” although some wells are as much as 10,000 feet lateral. This involves flexible drill pipes and very sophisticated drill bits guided by astonishing navigational tech. The idea is to drill as much hole as possible, through the oil-rich shale. This maximizes the surface area available to drain oil from the otherwise impermeable rock. Geologists and engineers call it “maximizing the pay zone.” This kind of directional drilling is a remarkable technical achievement in general. The ideas (and patents and trade secrets) took several decades to mature in the 1980s, 90s and 2000s. Plus, each oil-bearing region is different, so people who work in an area tend to develop in-house approaches. Over time — basically from about 2012 to 2019 — Noble’s engineering talent and the company’s drilling contractors became astonishingly proficient at grinding wells through the rocks far beneath that Colorado prairie. One particular Noble well set a speed record, requiring all of five days “from spud to spud.” That means that Noble drilled one well in five days, totaling about 11,000 feet of hole. And then the driller reset the rig and began preparing to drill the next well in the series. Frankly, that’s really impressive. Noble’s approach has been to drill numerous wells from a single “pad,” meaning a relatively small area, usually under about 4 acres. There, the company stages the rig, equipment, machinery, supplies, and the like. The wells go outwards laterally, so that if you look down it’s like seeing spokes on a wheel or the teeth on a comb. [Drilling Patterns] Top-down view of drilling patterns in a fracking operation. After the wells are drilled, the rig moves on to other jobs, while topside production equipment has a minor footprint, as you can see in these shots here: [Noble wells] Noble wells and production pads in DJB area. In the mid-2000s, the DJB area became dotted with pads and wells. The typical Noble pad supports 16 wells. Each cost about $4 million to drill, for a total of about $64 million per full pad. Of course, numbers vary from site to site; these are average figures. Early on, a run-of-the-drill Niobrara well flows at rates of 400 to 700 barrels per day. One Noble geologist stated, though, “We’re interested in maximizing long-term oil recovery; not in making splashy press releases about early flow-rates.” Per Noble, each well has an anticipated life of up to 30 years, with estimated ultimate recovery of about 350,000 barrels of oil to include associated gas and natural gas liquids (NGLs). So with 16 wells per pad, at 350,000 barrels each, we’re looking at about 5.6 million barrels per pad over the life of the operation. And this doesn’t include the possibility of “re-entering” a well in the future for new drilling, well-expansions or “re-fracking” an old well. That’ll bump up the numbers. But let’s stick with that 5.6-million-barrel number. About 70% of the oil comes out in the first six years, or just over 3.9 million barrels. And let’s say that the price per barrel is about $50, which is on the low side just now. The math totals to $195 million of cash flow per pad over six years. It more than pays down the initial $64 million capital cost to build out the operation. Although ongoing production maintenance and transportation also must be factored in. The good news for Noble has been that the geology and well costs paid for profitable operations. Such was not the case with many other fracking plays across the U.S., though; each oil field and region has its own tale to tell. But for Noble (now Chevron, as I noted above), that Niobrara rock still delivers immense volumes of oil and gas, much of it up front in the life-cycle and with strong economics. At $50 or more for oil, these DJB fracking plays made money for Noble and still do for Chevron. Still, as we’ve discussed in other articles, U.S. fracking may well be just a moment in time for the nation’s energy needs. That is, much fracking was funded with low-interest, “cheap” money all through the 2010s, courtesy of U.S. monetary policy and a long list of circumstances that are unique to the American oil patch. And even the best U.S. operations face severe headwinds from anti-fracking and anti-carbon policymakers from the local end to the state capitol in Denver and to far off Washington D.C. It’s an uphill climb for even the best of operations. Of course, the broader question remains of how the U.S. will remain an energized society. The U.S. uses about 20 million barrels of oil per day. It has to come from somewhere. Looking ahead, how will we keep the wheels rolling and the lights on? From the standpoint of history, that trip to the Cemex quarry and Noble well pads represented about 150 years of human ingenuity and effort to come up with all the ideas and technology that makes this work. And clearly, we have people in power right now who want to toss it all out, starting yesterday, and which will make for a rough time tomorrow. We’ll see how this unfolds. It’s all a story yet to be written. I’ll end with one last interesting point. Remember that Fort Hayes Limestone I mentioned earlier, which Cemex quarries? It turns out that quite a bit of it goes back down into the Niobrara — and I mean literally. That is, Cemex is a major cement supplier to well-completion businesses that serve the oil industry across Colorado. Limestone goes from quarry to kiln to cement, which the likes of Halliburton (HAL: NYSE) then pumps down into the ground to secure the steel pipe that makes a well. It’s kind of funny how geology works in real life. And how geology makes the rest of life possible as well. And on that note, I rest my case. That’s all for now… Thank you for subscribing and reading. Best wishes… [Byron King] Byron W. King All the best, [Sean Ring] Sean Ring Editor, Rude Awakening Twitter: [@seaniechaos]( [Paradigm]( ☰ ⊗ [ARCHIVE]( [ABOUT]( [Contact Us]( © 2024 Paradigm Press, LLC. 1001 Cathedral Street, Baltimore, MD 21201. By submitting your email address, you consent to Paradigm Press, LLC. delivering daily email issues and advertisements. To end your Rude Awakening e-mail subscription and associated external offers sent from Rude Awakening, feel free to [click here.]( Please note: the mailbox associated with this email address is not monitored, so do not reply to this message. We welcome comments or suggestions at feedback@rudeawakening.info. This address is for feedback only. For questions about your account or to speak with customer service, [contact us here]( or call (844)-731-0984. Although our employees may answer your general customer service questions, they are not licensed under securities laws to address your particular investment situation. 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