Fracking’s Thirst for Water

Some of the nation’s driest, drought-plagued places have quickly become its busiest hot spots of drilling for shale gas and oil, especially in Texas, Colorado and California. It’s a dust-bowl-sized problem likely to become worse, according to a study released Wednesday by the nonprofit sustainability advocacy group firm Ceres. Fracking, the controversial drilling technique, is […]

Areva and Niger’s uranium fight

When France began mining uranium ore in the desert of northern Niger in the early 1970s, Arlit was a cluster of miners’ huts stranded between the sun-blasted rocks of the Air mountains and the sands of the Sahara. The 1973 OPEC oil embargo changed that. France embraced nuclear power to free itself from reliance on […]

North Dakota Flares $100m of Natural Gas a Month

It is well known that advances in technology have enabled the US to experience a huge boom in oil production over the past several years. Since 2007, oil production from North Dakota’s Bakken formation has increased by 4,000%, and turning the state into the second largest oil producer after Texas. The problem is that a […]

Sorry, Shale. Iraq Is The Real Oil Revolution

After pushing up domestic crude oil production by about three million barrels a day (mb/d) in the United States, shale oil has inspired speculation about radical shifts in the global oil market. Radical shifts are certainly on the horizon, but something other than shale is likely to be driving them. That something is Iraq. Iraq […]

Industry proposes solution to flaring

Flaring has challenged North Dakota. Despite significant investments in gathering natural gas — about $5 billion since 2006 — the percentage of burned-off gas remains nearly constant. Exploration continues to greatly exceed the reach of gathering pipelines. It’s wasteful. It represents lost revenue for the owners of mineral rights, oil and gas producers and the […]

Marcellus Shale Gale Shifts Geography Of Natural Gas Supply And Demand

Natural gas production ticked up in the United States by about 1% last year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. This modest growth masks massive changes in the geography of domestic gas production, which has strained operating conditions on at least one major interstate natural gas pipeline in the Northeast. The primary pipelines that […]

Big Oil Companies Struggle to Justify Soaring Project Costs

A group that includes Exxon and Shell plans to spend $40 billion to pump oil from man-made islands in the Caspian Sea. The project’s budget has ballooned from $10 billion. NCOC/Associated Press Chevron Corp. CVX -0.72% , Exxon Mobil Corp. XOM -0.56% and Royal Dutch Shell RDSB.LN +3.11% PLC spent more than $120 billion in […]

Shell Stops Alaska Program in Year of ‘Hard Choices’

Royal Dutch Shell revealed Thursday that 2014 will see the company stop its Alaska program and focus on achieving better capital efficiency by making ‘hard choices’ about new projects and reducing capital spending. Announcing its results for 2013, Shell said that the landscape the company had expected has changed and it cited factors such as the worsening […]

Iraq and Iran plot oil revolution in challenge to Saudi Arabia

Iraq’s goal of pumping 9m barrels a day of crude could be a game changer for oil prices and British companies. Iraq is poised to flood the oil market by tripling its capacity to pump crude by 2020 and is collaborating with Iran on strategy in a move that will challenge Saudi Arabia’s grip on […]

Argentina’s Shale Industry Lures International Oil Companies

The whole world knows that shale revolutionized the U.S. energy industry. Now oil and gas executives are salivating when they think of Argentina’s booming shale industry. Argentina ranks second in the world, behind China, in potentially recoverable shale-gas reserves, with 802 trillion cubic feet, according to a study last October by the U.S. Energy Information […]

Technology Is Key To Unlock Unconventional Resources

Technology is a key for unlocking future resources, and oil and gas companies need to invest more on research and development in order to meet the increasing challenges, said speakers at panel discussion during the 7th edition of the International Petroleum Technology Conference (IPTC), which concluded Wednesday in Doha, Qatar. “From the dawn of the […]

Iraq oil exports dip in 2013

Iraq’s oil exports and revenues declined in 2013 compared to the previous year, official figures showed Wednesday, despite efforts to dramatically ramp up crude sales to fund much-needed reconstruction. Exports totalled 872.3 million barrels, or 2.39 million bpd, last year compared with 2.42 million bpd in 2012, according to oil ministry figures. Revenues dipped to […]

Tech Talk – Production, Profit and Projection

As we move steadily through the first month of this new year, US production of crude has continued to increase, with the EIA now showing levels of around 8.2 mbd production. Figure 1. US Domestic Crude production through the end of 2013 (EIA TWIP) Finished gasoline production has been floating around a level of 9.2 […]

Oil Glut Threatens US Shale Revolution

The year 2014 could pose a milestone for the U.S. oil industry. In its latest annual World Energy Outlook, the International Energy Agency predicted that the U.S. would become the world’s largest producer of oil by 2015, thus surpassing Russia and Saudi Arabia. Comparably, the U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that the U.S. will produce […]

TransCanada Will Look At Rail If Keystone Rejected

The chief executive of TransCanada said Wednesday if the Obama administration doesn’t approve the controversial Keystone XL pipeline his company will look to the more dangerous alternative of building build rail terminals in Alberta and Oklahoma. President Barack Obama is expected to decide early this year on Keystone XL, which is under review at the […]

Tech Talk – Coal mining continues to produce

Sadly I was away from home last week to attend a family funeral in Northumberland where, for the past nine generations including mine, our family have been miners. The funeral was for my father’s sister, Linda, who had documented early life in the mining village of Ashington in her books “A Tune for Bears to […]

Norway Sees Crude Production Growing for First Time in 14 Years

Norway, western Europe’s largest oil producer, expects output to rise 0.7 percent this year, ending a 13-year decline as new fields offset dwindling production from aging North Sea deposits. Total petroleum production will rise to 215 million cubic meters from 213.7 million cubic meters last year, the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate said today. Oil production will […]

Israel To Become Major Exporter of Natural Gas

As someone who grew up on heavy gassy Jewish food, it is no surprise that Israel is developing into a natural gas exporter. The gas finds have been developed by Noble Energy which has been operating in the Mediterranean Sea, offshore Israel, since 1998. They have a 47 percent interest in the Mari-B field, the […]

Qatari Energy Minister al-Sada downplays U.S. shale production

Qatar’s energy minister said the increase in gas production from U.S. shale deposits posed no long-term threat to his country’s stake in the global market. “We do not consider the U.S. shale gas revolution to be a game changer,” Mohammed bin Saleh al-Sada said in a Monday interview in London with the Daily Telegraph. The […]

Peak Oil: Clear As Mud

The U.S. will surpass Russia and Saudi Arabia as the world’s top oil producer by 2015, and be close to energy self-sufficiency in the next two decades, amid booming output from shale formations, the IEA said. (links in original) [1]  The International Energy Agency has sounded the alarm about a potential oil supply crunch…. (links […]

Another Canadian Oil Train Derails, Burns After Brakes Activated

A Canadian National Railway train carrying crude oil and propane derailed and caught fire in New Brunswick on Tuesday night after the emergency brakes were activated, federal safety officials said on Wednesday. The accident, the latest in a string of derailments that have put the surging crude-by-rail business under scrutiny, involved 17 cars on the […]

China to Double Oil, Gas Production by 2030

Top world energy consumer China is expected to double output of oil and gas to nearly 700 million tonnes of oil equivalent by 2030 as available resources rise, the Ministry of Land and Resources said on Wednesday. Decades of breakneck economic growth pushed China ahead of the United States to become the world’s top net […]

GOM Production and Other News

Not much happening on the Peak Oil front these days. I checked out the BSEE Gulf of Mexico production. Data is in kb/d with the last data point September 2013. Average production from the GOM has been relatively flat for the last two and one half years at about 1.260 million barrels per day. The […]

When Will U.S. Crude Oil Production Peak?

As recently as the mid-2000s, conventional wisdom held that U.S. crude oil production was in secular decline, while the nation’s demand for oil was expected to keep rising. But over the past five years, U.S. oil production has surged by more than 50%, while domestic demand has been more or less stagnant. Now, policymakers are […]

In Bakken (ND) it is Now Mostly about McKenzie County

In this post I present an update to my previous posts over at The Oil Drum (The Red Queen series) on developments in tight oil production from the Bakken formation in North Dakota with some additional estimates, mainly presented in charts. The expansion is much about the differences between wells capable of producing, actual producing […]

Problems and Politics Keeping Crude Oil Production Well Below Expectations

OPEC December Crude Output Falls to 2-Year Low: Survey Venezuelan Policies Venezuelan production dropped 235,000 barrels a day to 2.45 million this month, the survey showed. The South American country pumped the least crude since October 2011. Resources have been diverted from energy sector into social welfare programs, sending production lower. Petroleos de Venezuela SA, […]

Rise in Russian Oil Output Supports Overstretched Budget

Russia retained the title of the world’s top oil producer with 2013 output reaching a post-Soviet high as rising exports to China and strong prices allow the Kremlin to maintain record spending from an overstretched budget. Energy has been the engine of Russia’s growth during more than a decade of leadership by President Vladimir Putin, […]

IEA Forecasts Sustained Energy Growth, But No ‘Era of Oil Abundance’

The IEA’s latest long-term forecasts highlights the growth of unconventional oil and gas, especially in North America, but does not see this leading to much lower oil prices. In their main scenario fossil fuels will still meet more than three-fourths of the world’s energy needs by 2035, despite significant growth in renewable energy. The International Energy Agency (IEA) released […]

Cyprus: “On the Verge of Significant Energy Production”

In his introduction of Nicos Kouyialis, Minister for Natural Resources and Environment, Cyprus, panel moderator John Roberts characterized Cyprus as a country “on the verge of significant energy production,” an incredibly apt description, among others, at the 2nd Annual Frankfurt Gas Forum. “The discoveries of substantial quantities of natural gas open up new perspectives and […]

Daniel Yergin: The global impact of US shale

The emergence of shale gas and tight oil in the US demonstrates how innovation can change the balance of global economic and political power. Photo: Ty Wright/Bloomberg The biggest innovation in energy so far this century has been the development of shale gas and the associated resource known as tight oil. Shale energy ranks at […]

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