Why This Oil Crisis Is Different To 2008

They say history repeats itself, and given the cyclical nature of the oil and gas business, many look to the past when trying to guess what is coming next, but past experience doesn’t always offer an exact model for the present. Much has changed between the 2008 oil and gas downcycle and the one the […]

Russia’s Arctic Oil Rush

High in the Arctic circle, three oil terminals on Russia’s northern coast are already exporting as much crude oil as Libya — and that flow could double in the next five years. Russian Output It’s a sign the development of remote deposits in the country’s harsh and fragile north will play an increasingly important role as […]

Venezuela’s oil production just sank to a 13-year low

Venezuela’s oil production plunged to a 13-year low in June as the economic crisis continues to eat into the nation’s only source of export revenue. Venezuela’s oil production has declined by 170,000 barrels per day since the start of 2016, dipping to 2.18 million barrels per day (mb/d) in June, according to the IEA’s latest […]

Three Signs the End of Oil Exports is Coming

The first sign of the end of oil exports has already happened. The second is expected in about six yearsand the third in twenty years, by which time the price of oil will have dramatically increased and worldwide  oil exports will have effectively ceased. Broad systemic change involving new technologies has historically taken longer than […]

100000 oil jobs could be coming back

Good news laid-off oil workers: U.S. energy companies could soon face a serious worker shortage. Goldman Sachs believes the American oil industry is about to stage a big comeback from the painful downturn and big job losses caused by oversupply. As more oil fields come on line and America’s oil boom gets back on track, […]

In World Of $50 Oil, Shale Beats Deepwater

U.S. shale is the lowest cost option for new oil production and is likely to be more competitive than conventional offshore drilling, according to a new report from Wood Mackenzie. The U.S. shale industry has weathered the oil price downturn, tweaking drilling practices and cutting costs in order to stay in business. A new report […]

Using Renewables In Oil Recovery

As a Canadian I have witnessed firsthand the vilification of Canada’s oil sands. Canadians concerned with the effect oil sands have on the world likely led to a shift of Canada’s federal and Alberta’s provincial governments from ones that did not actively address climate change to ones that ran on a platform of reducing greenhouse […]

Timeline of Bakken oil production

For long-term archive purposes, here is a timeframe for the Bakken boom. 6/28 – The Million Dollar Way – The Bakken Is In Its Manufacturing Stage – Bruce Oksol provides a useful long-term perspective on how Bakken production has developed: 2000: the Bakken boom begins in Montana 2007: the Bakken boom begins in North Dakota […]

Oil or nothing

The United States has more oil than Saudi Arabia, says a new study by Norwegian consultancy Rystad Energy. The size of American reserves, at 264 billion barrels, is around a fifth higher than what is estimated to be located in the desert kingdom. That’s a surprise. But it’s also beside the point. Oil supremacy goes […]

Mega-Fracs Are The Reason The Depletion Of US Oil Production Has Muted During The World Glut

We have all heard about improved production per foot in current oil and gas unconventional wells.  This improvement has been going on for a very long time, and started with completion styles that break up rock better close to the well bore.  This is the reason we have seen a much slower decline in US […]

Oil production in continental U.S. has fallen sharply since 2015 peak

Oil production in the nation’s lower 48 states has dropped by 800,000 barrels a day in the 12 months after it peaked, one of the biggest reasons why the world’s oil glut has eased. A dramatic surge in oil drilling and fracking across Texas and North Dakota pushed production outside of Alaska and the Gulf of […]

The Oil World’s Little Secret

Everything about oil is big: the money; the political stakes. Back in the day, even the hair on “Dallas” wasn’t small. But in one crucial respect, small has become more fashionable. This year, spending on developing oil and gas fields is forecast to be $462 billion worldwide, its lowest since 2009, according to Rystad Energy, an […]

Russia’s Oil Production Won’t Falter

One recent headline from RT had me shaking my head:  “Running on empty: Russia has less than three decades of oil remaining.” Yogi was right: “It’s deja vu all over again.” Remember Energy Minister Victor Khristenko’s warning in 2005 that Russian oil production “will reach a certain plateau of production within the time frame of 2010.” Remember […]

Venezuela’s Oil Output Decline Accelerates as Drillers Go Unpaid

Venezuela’s oil output, already the lowest since 2009, is set to slide further this year as contractors scale back drilling after the cash-strapped country fell more than $1 billion behind in payments. The Latin American nation’s oil production, which generates 95 percent of export revenue, will decline by about 11 percent to 2.1 million barrels a […]

Oil, Interest Rates, and Debt

At first glance it is hard to see how oil, interest rates and debt are connected. Two of them are human constructs while oil (fossil sunlight), a gift from Mother Nature, took tens of millions of years to process. Oil is an endowment extracted from a confined underground stock and is now the most dense […]

Why We Can Expect Cripplingly Higher Oil Prices

The break-even price for Permian basin tight oil plays is about $61 per barrel (Table 1). That puts Permian plays among the lowest cost significant supply sources in the world. Although that is good news for U.S. tight oil plays, there is a dark side to the story. Just because tight oil is low-cost compared […]

Oil Glut Is Fading Where You Would Least Expect

Saudi inventories fall for longest running stretch in 15 years Kingdom supplying the market with more oil than it’s producing Saudi Arabia, a country nearly synonymous with plentiful crude supplies, is offering one of the strongest signs yet that the glut that has plagued the oil market since 2014 is coming to an end. Despite […]

Saudi Arabia has declared an end to its oil war with the US

Two years after quietly declaring war on upstart US shale, Saudi Arabia says the need for the fighting is over. In remarks to journalists while on a US visit, Saudi Arabian energy minister Khalid Al-Falih said that the worldwide oil glut has vanished, signaling an end to Saudi Arabia’s strategy of flooding the global market […]

EIA Annual Outlook Misses The Mark On Threat To Utilities, Generation Revolution

So many studies, so little time. Just in the past couple of weeks analyses from DoE’s Energy Information Administration, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, British Petroleum and the International Renewable Energy Agency have hit my inbox (thank goodness we have moved beyond the old hardcopy stage, just those reports alone would have contributed to the world’s […]

Saudi energy minister says oil glut has vanished

Saudi Arabia’s new energy minister said the supply glut that kindled a crippling oil rout around the world and thrashed Houston’s biggest business for two years has finally vanished. “We are out of it,” Khalid Al-Falih said in his first newspaper interview since his rise to the most powerful job in the global energy industry […]

One Way to Solve Fracking’s Water Problem: Don’t Use Water

The shale gas revolution brought the U.S. both energy-superpower status and a short list of headaches. There are engineering challenges, many wells have a disappointingly short productive lifetime, and those lifetimes can vary even within the same field. Then there are the much-debated environmental trade-offs. Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, requires copious water. And while gas-fired power plants […]

World Energy 2016-2050

World Energy 2016-2050: Annual Report “Political Economist” June 2016 The purpose of this annual report is to provide an analytical framework evaluating the development of world energy supply and its impact on the global economy. The report projects the world supply of oil, natural gas, coal, nuclear, hydro, wind, solar, and other energies from 2016 to 2050. […]

Comparing The EIA And OPEC Production Numbers

The latest OPEC Monthly Oil Market Report is out, showing OPEC crude only production numbers for May, 2016. I have compared these numbers with those published by the EIA in their Short-Term Energy Outlook table 3a. All data is in thousand barrels per day and the last data point is in May 2016, except for […]

Venezuela’s Oil Production Tumbles as Economic Crisis Worsens

Hungry Venezuelans are rioting and looting amid worsening food shortages, but the OPEC country’s remote oil fields have been sheltered from the social unrest so far. But Venezuela’s blistering economic crisis is hitting them full on. Output in the country, which has the world’s largest oil reserves, dropped to 2.37 million barrels per day (bpd) […]

IEA Sees Global Oil Market Returning To Surplus In Early 2017

Oil supply and demand will balance in the second half of 2016 after a series of unplanned production outages, but the market is expected to tilt into surplus in the first half of next year, the International Energy Agency said on Tuesday. The agency said demand growth in 2017 is likely to be flat at around […]

The Collapse of Coal

The last of the big-time U.S. coal companies has gone bankrupt, and in the hills of Appalachia, they’re looking for their next move. How will the former coal miners find new careers and build new industries? How will the liabilities of coal companies ever get paid? And how did we get into this situation in […]

Unplanned Global Oil Supply Disruptions Reach Highest Level Since At Least 2011

Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration, Short-Term Energy Outlook, June 2016. Note: OPEC is the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. OPEC disruptions include crude oil only, while non-OPEC disruptions include crude oil and other liquid fuels.   Unplanned global oil supply disruptions averaged more than 3.6 million barrels per day (b/d) in May 2016, the […]

No oil jobs in an oil-rich Kingdom

Zaid Al-Sahli thought a degree in oil engineering would guarantee him a job in Saudi Arabia. The Arab kingdom is after all the largest crude oil exporter in the world. But after spending 18 months sending his resume to hundreds of oil companies in Ryiadh and the Eastern province, it became clear to Al-Sahli that […]

Harold Hamm: Oil Above $60 Would Justify New Drilling

Harold Hamm, Continental Resources chairman and chief executive officer, discusses the outlook for U.S. oil production with Bloomberg’s Alix Steel on “What’d You Miss?”

Saudi Arabia approves transformation plan, sets 2030 oil, gas targets

Saudi Arabia’s cabinet approved a new economic plan Monday to diversify state revenue in the world’s largest crude oil exporter away from oil by 2030. It also set oil and gas production-capacity targets for the period. The National Transformation Program elaborates on the Vision 2030 document released in April as the brainchild of Deputy Crown […]

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