• Brent crude futures climbed 20 cents, or 0.2%, to $104.03 a barrel at press time, while U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude (WTI) fell 64 cents, or 0.6%, to $95.70 a barrel.
• “While the U.S. frac sand market remains optically oversupplied, idled capacity has been slow to reactivate, and we now think that ‘normalized’ frac sand pricing could at least be cash generative,” Morgan Stanley’s Connor Lynagh wrote of U.S. Silica.
• Marco Perez Jr., aka Sully Perez, 37, the founder and director of Permian Basin Proppants Inc. (PBP), was sentenced to 168 months in prison and ordered to pay $14,538,967.27 in restitution for operating a Ponzi scheme. Between 2017 and 2022, Perez used PBP to perpetuate a Ponzi scheme by soliciting investor money based on misrepresentations, according to a press release from the Department of Justice.