Is the Red Queen outrunning Bakken LTO extraction?

This post is an update on LTO extraction in Bakken based upon published data from the North Dakota Industrial Commission (NDIC) as per January 2015. This post also presents a closer look at developments in LTO extracted from the three of the four counties that presently dominates LTO extraction; McKenzie, Mountrail and Williams. With an […]

Texas RRC Report and Other Peak Oil News

The Texas Rail Road Commission has released its latest stats with production numbers through January. There is always a delay in these numbers and that is why you see the production graph lines seem to droop toward the recent months. Because of this I post six months data so the data can be compared in […]

OPEC Crude plus More on EIA Estimates

The katest OPEC Monthly Oil Market Report is out with OPEC crude only production numbers for February. All data in the OPEC charts below is in thousand barrels per day and the last data point is February 2015. Total OPEC crude only production was down 137,600 barrels per day in February. Algeria seems to have stabilized […]

Iran Can Add Million Barrels a Day of Oil Without Sanctions

Iran could raise oil exports by 1 million barrels a day without international sanctions, its oil minister said as talks resumed with the U.S. over the nation’s nuclear program. “If sanctions are lifted, we can raise our exports by one million barrels per day within a few months,” Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh said Monday […]

Debunking America’s Energy Fantasy: Shale Gas and Tight Oil Peak in Next Decade

We’ve written from time to time on how reports of America’s coming energy independence and continuing access to lots of affordable domestic shale gas and oil are based on studies that more careful geological work have demonstrated to be optimistic, and by a large margin. We’ve repeatedly pointed out, for instance, that shale gas production […]

Technology revived, will sustain oil industry

Technological innovation revived the nation’s oil and gas production after decades of decline, and innovation will help the industry through the current oil price slump. That was the key message of Jon Olson, newly named chairman of the Petroleum and Geosystems Department within the University of Texas Cockrell School of Engineering. Participating in the “UT […]

The US is producing oil that has nowhere to go

Former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan appeared on Bloomberg TV Friday to talk about the oil market. Specifically, he zeroed in on the problem going on in the US market: basically, production hasn’t dropped like people expected it to, and it’s largely illegal to export American crude, so all of the excess oil is building up […]

Lipstick on a pig: America as the world’s swing producer of oil

Most people have heard the old saying: “You can put lipstick on a pig. But it’s still a pig.” That’s sort of what is happening in the American oil patch as producers try to put a positive gloss on the devastation that low oil prices are visiting on the industry. Perhaps the most inventive redefinition […]

Iraq builds up arrears to majors as oil price drops

Iraq is building up debts to the oil companies developing its giant fields, industry sources said, a further sign of how the oil-price drop is putting a squeeze on revenues in OPEC’s second-largest producer. Western oil companies including Royal Dutch Shell, BP and Exxon Mobil are working at Iraq’s southern oilfields under service contracts, which […]

Norwegian Crude Oil Reserves And Extraction per 2014

In this post I present actual Norwegian crude oil extraction and status on the development in discoveries and reserves and what this has now resulted in for expectations for future Norwegian crude oil extraction. This post is also an update of an earlier post about Norwegian crude oil reserves and production per 2013. Norwegian crude […]

US Oil Production Could Plunge in Summer

The oil market has been very weak over the past seven months. The price of a WTI contract went down more than 50% from its 2014 peak of $107 per barrel. Part of the reason for this dramatic sell-off is a resurgent US dollar, which is dragging down oil and commodities in general. However, oil […]

ExxonMobil CEO Wrong About “Resilience” of Tight Oil Production

ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson is wrong about the resilience of U.S. tight oil production. Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported: “…Mr. Tillerson pointed out that the collapse in natural-gas prices similarly had led the number of rigs drilling for that fuel to drop to 280 from north of 1,600 in 2008. Gas output jumped 50% in that time, he […]

Has California’s Fracking Boom Already Gone Bust?

We accelerate down the runway — a tiny asphalt strip next to Taft Skydiving. Our little Piper Cherokee lifts off and as we ascend, I peer out the window. Below us is California’s Kern County and more than a century of oil exploration — from the gushers of the 1800s to today’s less robust reality. […]

Is a Chinese Shale Revolution in the Offing?

Countries across the globe like to talk a big game about developing their domestic shale oil and gas resources and sometimes utter lofty expectations of energy independence. Progress, however, has been very slow. The following map by the World Resources Institute (WRI) illustrates locations of the 20 countries with the largest shale gas and tight […]

Introducing Fracklog, the New-Fangled Oil Storage System

Oil drillers expecting prices to rebound after the biggest drop in six years have come up with an alternative to storing their crude in tanks: They’re keeping it in the ground. It’s a new twist on an old oil-trading technique, known as a contango storage play, in which a trader buys cheap crude in an […]

World Rig Counts Declining

The weekly Baker Hughes Rig Count for North America and the International monthly rig count is out. In the charts below the monthly data is through February 2015 and the weekly data is as of March 6th. World Rig Count, counting oil, gas and miscellaneous rigs are down 684 rigs over the last three months. The annual […]

Oil Production in Federal Gulf of Mexico Expected to Continue Increasing

Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration. Note: Production data have not yet been reported for four of the eight fields (Cardamom Deep, Jack, St. Malo, and Tubular Bells). Because of the long timelines associated with Gulf of Mexico (GOM) projects, the recent downturn in oil prices is expected to have minimal direct impact on GOM crude […]

US shale oil growth practically zero in 2017

The International Energy Agency’s Medium Term Oil Market Report 2015 included an interesting graph showing changes in US and Russian oil production for the next 5 years: IEA MTOMR February 2015 Fig 1: US and Russian oil production changes 2009-2020 https://www.iea.org/newsroomandevents/speeches/150210_MTOMR_slides.pdf The light blue columns show forecasts done in the 3rd quarter 2014, the dark blue […]

Low Oil Price May Stifle Deepwater Drilling And Oil Sands But Not Fracking

Saudi Arabia and OPEC may have dropped oil prices to stifle production in the U.S. and other competing nations, but they didn’t drop it enough to stifle the U.S. oil and gas boom from fracking, a senior expert with McKinsey and Company said in Chicago. “If the Saudis think they’re going to put U.S. shale players out […]

Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline not abandoned

The Pakistani commerce minister says the country has not abandoned the Iran-Pakistan (IP) gas pipeline project, which is scheduled to provide Pakistan with Iranian natural gas. Pakistan will pursue the IP project after the removal of anti-Iran sanctions, the Express Tribune quoted Khurram Dastgir Khan as saying in a Saturday report. “A gas pipeline that […]

Venezuela: A Closer Look at the Oil Economy of Venezuela

Venezuela contains some of the largest oil and natural gas proven reserves in the world. In 2013, Venezuela was the third-largest exporter of crude oil to the United States. It consistently ranks as one of the top suppliers of crude oil to the United States. Venezuela was the world’s 9th largest exporter and 12th largest […]

Oil sector successful, Iran says

Most sectors of the Iranian economy are performing well, with the oil sector in particular performing as expected, the country’s deputy oil minister said. Iranian budgetary planners said they’re taking the steps necessary to reduce the leverage of oil revenue in the nation’s economy. Deputy Oil Minister Mansour Moazzami told the Oil Ministry’s official news […]

Platts Light Houston Sweet Crude

Much has been made of the domestic light sweet crude flooding US markets, and we attempted to capture some key points about some of that oil in this infographic centered on one Platts key price assessments: Light Houston Sweet. For a limited time, we’ll be sharing weekly LHS wraps in the Light Houston Sweet Analysis feature, […]

Are oil producers running out of closet space?

Oil supply running ahead of demand hasn’t just pressured prices, it’s also filling up storage space, potentially pushing crude toward another leg down. “We’re going to see pretty fast inventory builds over the next few weeks,” Francisco Blanch, head of commodity research at Bank of America-Merrill Lynch, told CNBC Wednesday, noting that global supply is […]

The Easy Oil Is Gone

In 2008, Canadian economist Jeff Rubin stunned the oil market with a bold prediction: With the world economy growing at 5% a year, oil demand would grow with it, outpacing supply, thus lifting the oil price from $147 to over $200 a barrel. The former chief economist at CIBC World Markets was so convinced of […]

North Sea Oil Production Continues to Slide

Oil production in the British section of the North Sea declined in 2014 amid rising costs, high taxes and low oil prices , underscoring the need for more investment and exploration there, an industry association said Tuesday. The report by Oil & Gas U.K., a lobbying group, comes as the oil industry has stepped up […]

The Bakken, What the Data Tells US

I have been supplied an Excel spreadsheet of all North Dakota wells back to 2006, thanks to Enno Peters and Dennis Coyne. I only used the data back to 2007 however. This is a wealth of information for if we want to know how many wells came on line in a given month, we simply […]

Workers at nation’s largest oil refinery join growing strike

Workers at the nation’s largest oil refinery have joined a strike that now includes more than 6,500 workers. The United Steelworkers union says the nation’s oil producers aren’t taking seriously the safety concerns of its 30,000 members. The oil industry says it shares the union’s commitment to safety, but rejects the union’s concerns about non-union […]

The oil price: The Saudi project, part two

Stage one of Saudi Arabia’s plan — or perhaps hope — to restructure the oil market is taking longer than expected. By refusing to rein in production while prices fell, the Saudis permitted a big surplus to grow and served notice on higher-cost rivals (Russia, Venezuela, American shale-oil producers) that they would not prop up […]

Natural gas production breaking records

Pennsylvania’s unconventional gas wells continued to blast production records out of the water last year, pumping out nearly 4 trillion cubic feet of gas. According to data the state Department of Environmental Protection released Tuesday, Feb. 17, operators working in the Marcellus Shale industry reported producing nearly 1 trillion cubic feet more gas in 2014 […]

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