<![CDATA[Mark Kenneth Roach]]>https://markkroach.substack.comhttps://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!QHL9!,w_256,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fce218779-4046-4865-856b-33f98ac9cf50_1280x1280.pngMark Kenneth Roachhttps://markkroach.substack.comSubstackWed, 02 Sep 2026 05:09:21 GMT<![CDATA[Venezuela's $100B+ oil deal, Bakken's rig comeback, and why US natural gas is priced so differently than Europe — live upstream analysis from 30+ years in the oil patch. 🛢️🔴LIVE]]>https://markkroach.substack.com/p/venezuelas-100b-oil-deal-bakkenshttps://markkroach.substack.com/p/venezuelas-100b-oil-deal-bakkensTue, 01 Sep 2026 00:30:44 GMTMark Roach goes live on a Monday afternoon (August 31, 2026) to break down the historic US-Venezuela oil pact — a deal giving US interests 55% effective control of a new joint venture holding rights to 65 billion barrels of reserves across 17 fields, targeting a doubling of Venezuelan output to 1.5 million barrels/day. He also covers company-specific deals from Chevron, Hunt Oil, Schlumberger, and Halliburton, gives a Bakken shale five-to-ten year outlook (rigs climbing back to 37, EOR/CO2 recovery potential), and explains the Henry Hub vs. Dutch TTF natural gas price disconnect while taking live audience questions.

]]><![CDATA[The Corridor's Fine Print]]>https://markkroach.substack.com/p/the-corridors-fine-printhttps://markkroach.substack.com/p/the-corridors-fine-printThu, 27 Aug 2026 21:00:41 GMTA corridor was announced through the Strait of Hormuz and Brent gave up about 7 percent, settling at 87.84. Read the fine print and what was announced is a permission process, not a reopening. Transits are running near 15 a day against the 130 to 140 that used to be routine. The price repriced. The physical world did not. That gap is the week.

Energy, Oil & Gas, Geopolitics, Market Analysis, California, Upstream

]]><![CDATA[Brent at Ninety, and the New Rigs Stayed Home]]>https://markkroach.substack.com/p/brent-at-ninety-and-the-new-rigshttps://markkroach.substack.com/p/brent-at-ninety-and-the-new-rigsThu, 27 Aug 2026 00:01:18 GMTBrent settled at 90.21 a barrel and the American oil patch barely blinked. That is not caution, and it is not weakness. It is what happens when tariffs can rewrite a drilling budget mid-contract, when the best rock left is under deep water, and when the profit in the barrel has quietly migrated downstream to the refiners. This week I took that argument live and answered the comments it produced.

Energy, Oil & Gas, Market Analysis, Refining, Geopolitics, Live

]]><![CDATA[The Reallocation Nobody Announced]]>https://markkroach.substack.com/p/the-reallocation-nobody-announcedhttps://markkroach.substack.com/p/the-reallocation-nobody-announcedThu, 20 Aug 2026 21:15:43 GMTSix of the eight biggest oil companies on Earth made about $93 billion in profit last quarter. Almost none of it is being used to drill for more American wells. Chevron and ConocoPhillips cut Lower-48 spending 10% in the first half. Occidental cut Permian 20%. Chevron’s 2026 Permian budget is now about 25% below where it was last year. Six global majors trimmed combined 2026 capex by $4 billion. The upstream industry has quietly reorganized itself out of onshore American growth and into three other things — shareholder returns, long-cycle deepwater in politically quieter countries, and midstream pipelines feeding the data-center power buildout. This week’s update walks the full picture, including a From the Room reflection on what the younger people showing up in Austin and Springfield are actually looking for.

energy, oil and gas, natural gas, upstream, deepwater, private equity

]]><![CDATA[The Wrong Slice: Where the Record Oil Profits Are Actually Coming From]]>https://markkroach.substack.com/p/the-wrong-slice-where-the-recordhttps://markkroach.substack.com/p/the-wrong-slice-where-the-recordWed, 19 Aug 2026 21:30:21 GMTEight oil majors booked $93 billion in the second quarter. Three windfall profit tax bills are moving through the Senate. And almost nobody outside this business is talking about which slice of a $4.09 gallon of gasoline the record profits are actually coming from - the slice Washington’s bills are aimed at, or the one they leave untouched. In this first FutureWise Energy call-in edition, six viewers ask their sharpest questions and Mark Roach answers each one from thirty years inside the upstream industry - including a From the Room story about mistaking a price window for a floor that puts a lived lesson under the whole thing.

A record price window is a window. Not a floor. The refining margins that hit an all-time high two weeks ago are the same category of number my seller was staring at back then. They will not be there forever. They may not even be there when the bill takes effect.

energy, oil and gas, gasoline prices, refining margins, windfall profits tax, upstream

]]><![CDATA[Public Nuisance]]>https://markkroach.substack.com/p/public-nuisancehttps://markkroach.substack.com/p/public-nuisanceSun, 16 Aug 2026 00:00:46 GMTThe law does not have a concept for what Meta did. It has a concept for a guy blocking a sidewalk. It kept turning the dial up on the sidewalk guy until the number felt right, and the number never felt right, they just got tired. In Denbighshire the number was two hundred pounds. In Santa Fe the number was five hundred sixty-seven million. In Oakland this week they opened the real trial. Seven weeks, twelve people, no phones.

Comedy, Dark Comedy, Late Night, Media Criticism, Institutions, Cultural Commentary

]]><![CDATA[The Fight Over the Number]]>https://markkroach.substack.com/p/the-fight-over-the-numberhttps://markkroach.substack.com/p/the-fight-over-the-numberThu, 13 Aug 2026 21:00:52 GMTThe U.S. commercial crude oil inventory posted its largest weekly build in months this week - 17.4 million barrels added - and the price of crude oil did not fall. In any normal week that print knocks two or three dollars off. This week the market ignored it. The reason is on X, where the Energy Secretary is publicly disputing a private shipping data firm’s count of how many tankers actually crossed the Strait of Hormuz on Tuesday. The description of the strait has become the fight, and the money is trusting the tanker count, not the political statement.

Energy, Oil and Gas, Geopolitics, Market Analysis, Hormuz

]]><![CDATA[Your Gallon, Taken Apart ]]>https://markkroach.substack.com/p/your-gallon-taken-aparthttps://markkroach.substack.com/p/your-gallon-taken-apartThu, 13 Aug 2026 04:00:49 GMTRegular gasoline is $4.01 a gallon. Crude oil accounts for $1.86 of it, tax for about 70 cents, and everything between the wellhead and your tank for the remaining $1.45. All four numbers are published. The company that drilled the well keeps somewhere between 10 and 30 cents, and it barely moved a rig all summer. The money that was unusual this year was made in the middle of the chain, and almost nobody was looking there.

Energy, Oil and gas, Gasoline prices, Refining, Economics, Markets

]]><![CDATA[The Greenland Oil Play: What's Actually Being Sold]]>https://markkroach.substack.com/p/the-greenland-oil-play-whats-actuallyhttps://markkroach.substack.com/p/the-greenland-oil-play-whats-actuallyThu, 13 Aug 2026 00:01:18 GMTIn 50 years, no one has ever pulled a commercial barrel of crude oil out of Greenland. Exxon, Shell, Statoil, Chevron, Cairn Energy - the majors and independents with the technical bench and the balance sheet all came, drilled, and left. This fall, a Nasdaq-listed vehicle called Greenland Energy is going to try again, under a grandfathered 2014 onshore license that predates the country’s 2021 exploration ban. But what’s being priced into the ticker right now is not discovery odds. It’s optionality on a political story - one being written above the operator’s head. And that story deserves to be read plainly.

Energy, Oil and Gas, Geopolitics, Arctic, Market Analysis

]]><![CDATA[The Tank Funds The Print?]]>https://markkroach.substack.com/p/the-tank-funds-the-printhttps://markkroach.substack.com/p/the-tank-funds-the-printThu, 06 Aug 2026 20:30:37 GMTTwo weeks ago on this channel I told you what to watch when the supermajors reported. I said the number that carried the meaning was the upstream unit margin per barrel — whether the integrated oil companies were actually capturing the war-driven Brent rally into their producing segment. This week the reports came in and graded the call. Chevron’s upstream earnings tripled year over year to 8.2 billion dollars. ExxonMobil’s headline dinged on refinery maintenance while net income set a four-year high at 14.5 billion. BP beat and CEO Meg O’Neill spent the call talking about strengthening the balance sheet. ConocoPhillips beat and handed three billion dollars back to shareholders instead of adding rigs. The energy sector as a whole grew Q2 earnings 128 percent year over year, three times the market average. And the Strategic Petroleum Reserve — the public tank that funds the market those private companies printed on — posted 308 million barrels, the lowest level this country has held since March of 1983. Both facts sit on the same set of filings.

Oil and gas, Energy markets, Upstream, SPR, OPEC

]]><![CDATA[CNOOC: Twenty Years of Not Needing Us]]>https://markkroach.substack.com/p/cnooc-twenty-years-of-not-needinghttps://markkroach.substack.com/p/cnooc-twenty-years-of-not-needingWed, 05 Aug 2026 20:30:35 GMTIn 2005, a Chinese state-owned oil company tried to buy a mid-sized American producer for 18.5 billion dollars in cash. Congress stopped it. Twenty-one years later, that same country is the reason a barrel of Brent isn’t at 130 dollars right now. The arc between those two dates - the rerouted private-equity capital, the South China Sea deepwater program, the LNG contracts signed everywhere except North America, the electric vehicles displacing 1.4 million barrels a day of gasoline demand, and the second-quarter decision to just stop buying at high prices - is the twenty-year plan most Americans have never seen.

Energy, Oil & Gas, China, Geopolitics, LNG, Market Analysis

]]><![CDATA[Big Money Moved Anyway]]>https://markkroach.substack.com/p/big-money-moved-anywayhttps://markkroach.substack.com/p/big-money-moved-anywayThu, 30 Jul 2026 22:30:43 GMTBrent settled near 87 dollars, the U.S. rig count fell to 587 (its first weekly decline in six weeks), and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve dropped to a four-decade low. In the same seven days, the U.S. imported zero barrels from Saudi Arabia and Iraq, five and a half billion dollars of American onshore assets changed hands between publicly traded producers and their private-equity sellers, and three American PE firms wrote a 16 billion dollar check to Kuwait’s pipeline network. This is what a reorganization looks like when nobody calls it that.

Energy, Oil and Gas, Permian Basin, Private Equity, Geopolitics, Market Analysis, Capital Discipline

]]><![CDATA[The Wells Outlived the Money]]>https://markkroach.substack.com/p/the-wells-outlived-the-moneyhttps://markkroach.substack.com/p/the-wells-outlived-the-moneyThu, 30 Jul 2026 00:30:35 GMTLast month a California operator paid $30 million in cash to move a loan deadline back 32 days. The same document, signed the same day, deferred the money set aside to seal its wells until 2028. Nothing about that was illegal. It is the ordinary handling of a well’s ending. Los Angeles is where we can watch that arrangement run all the way to the finish, and count what it left behind.

A structure where every step is legal and the end result is a $13 billion public bill is not a structure that failed. It is a structure doing what it was built to do.

Energy, California, Oil and gas, Decommissioning, Environmental liability, Markets

]]><![CDATA[The Oil Exists. The Question Is Whether It Can Travel]]>https://markkroach.substack.com/p/the-oil-exists-the-question-is-whetherhttps://markkroach.substack.com/p/the-oil-exists-the-question-is-whetherThu, 23 Jul 2026 21:00:54 GMTOil closed the week at $90.73 a barrel, Brent at $98.76, both up sharply on fighting near the Strait of Hormuz and a tanker incident near the Bab el Mandeb Strait. It is tempting to read that as proof the world is running short. It is not. Oil for delivery today is trading above the September contract, the EIA’s own forecast has Brent falling back toward $74 this quarter, and the deal market kept buying Permian and North Sea acreage right through the spike. A barrel in the ground and a barrel on the dock are not the same thing, and this week the difference between them set the price.

Energy, Oil and Gas, WTI, Geopolitics, Market Analysis, Strategic Petroleum Reserve

]]><![CDATA[Where The Stories Went]]>https://markkroach.substack.com/p/where-the-stories-wenthttps://markkroach.substack.com/p/where-the-stories-wentWed, 22 Jul 2026 20:01:17 GMTAnybody can react to a headline. The real education is in watching a story play out over time. So instead of the weekly update, this is a follow-up: 10 threads, from the Hormuz reversal to the Citgo auction to a quiet record in the Gulf, and where each one honestly stands today.

Energy, Oil & Gas, Geopolitics, Market Analysis, Natural Gas

]]><![CDATA[The Week That Doesn’t Add Up]]>https://markkroach.substack.com/p/the-week-that-doesnt-add-uphttps://markkroach.substack.com/p/the-week-that-doesnt-add-upThu, 16 Jul 2026 21:01:31 GMTThis week the United States produced more crude oil than any nation ever has, while the emergency reserve meant to backstop world supply sank to its lowest level since 1983. At the same time the government’s own price forecast swung roughly 40 dollars a barrel in five months, up on a war and back down on a memo. None of it fits together, and that mismatch is the honest state of the business right now.

Energy, Oil & Gas, Crude Oil, Natural Gas, Market Analysis, Geopolitics

]]><![CDATA[Am I AI? Answer the Questions Instead]]>https://markkroach.substack.com/p/am-i-ai-answer-the-questions-insteadhttps://markkroach.substack.com/p/am-i-ai-answer-the-questions-insteadWed, 15 Jul 2026 22:02:21 GMTSomeone in the comments called me a robot, and told the room to skip me and read the auto-generated summary instead. Fair enough. So rather than insist I’m real, I answered the hardest questions you sent this week, the ones a summary engine falls apart on. The drilled-well backlog, the Permian plateau, negative gas, China’s stockpile. If the read holds up, that is the only proof worth anything.

Energy, Oil & Gas, Permian Basin, Natural Gas, Market Analysis, Upstream

]]><![CDATA[The Forecast With a Shelf Life ]]>https://markkroach.substack.com/p/the-forecast-with-a-shelf-lifehttps://markkroach.substack.com/p/the-forecast-with-a-shelf-lifeThu, 09 Jul 2026 22:01:12 GMTOn Tuesday the government’s energy forecasters released the most optimistic oil outlook in months. By Wednesday the Strait of Hormuz ceasefire had collapsed, crude had jumped 11 percent, and the number was worthless. Nothing physical changed. The same barrels sat in the same wells. What moved was a diplomatic assumption, and that is the quiet truth underneath every clean forecast: the oil was never the problem, we are.

Energy, Oil and Gas, Oil Prices, Geopolitics, Market Analysis

]]><![CDATA[The Barrel Moved Offshore]]>https://markkroach.substack.com/p/the-barrel-moved-offshorehttps://markkroach.substack.com/p/the-barrel-moved-offshoreThu, 09 Jul 2026 03:00:28 GMTThe most productive oil basin in America is running fewer drilling rigs than it has in years, and it just set a production record. That sounds like a mistake. It is not. It is the single clearest signal of where the upstream business is actually headed, and almost nobody is reading it correctly. The marginal barrel of oil has moved back offshore, into deep water controlled by a handful of very large companies and national governments.

Energy, Oil & Gas, Offshore, Geopolitics, Market Analysis

]]><![CDATA[What “Shortage” Really Means]]>https://markkroach.substack.com/p/what-shortage-really-meanshttps://markkroach.substack.com/p/what-shortage-really-meansWed, 08 Jul 2026 22:01:24 GMTLast week you sent me more than a hundred questions/comments about a single word, and most of you were using “shortage” to mean four different things at once. So this week the whole episode is yours, built straight from your comments. The frame is simple: reserves, inventories, logistics, and politics are four separate clocks. A draining SPR measures the fast one on the surface, not the resource under the ground, and once you hold those apart, the arguments stop contradicting each other.

Energy, Oil & Gas, Crude Oil, Gas Prices, Market Analysis, Refining

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