Most recent discussion of oil markets focused on prices and the volatility of price movements. These are surely very important, and the driver of almost everything else happening in energy markets. Looking at North Dakota here is the percentage change in labor force (year-over-year) for North Dakota as a whole and for the four core Bakken oil counties.
So I told my forecasting students I would post what I taught them today. I project monthly ND oil prices forward to the end of 2016. The following graph is the result of this process.
The latest, greatest way to track performance in the U.S. oil industry is to look at the rig count released by Baker Hughes (see this Bloomberg article for a bit of discussion and links). The rig count was down 64 as U.S. oil companies continued retrenching in the face of lower oil prices.
The December numbers for employment came out and I thought we would look at the mining category (which includes logging) against the West Texas Intermediate crude price per barrel. What we see is the following:
A little follow-up to the postings on employment, particularly for the one about Grand Forks (here). Talking with JT on the radio today, or maybe it was off-air, the difference between city and county came up. So let’s take a look at this: