Saudi Arabia’s Naimi Says Current Situation Best for Oil

Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest crude exporter, is content with current conditions in the oil market, the kingdom’s petroleum minister said three days before OPEC members meet to assess the group’s output policy. “This is the best environment for the market,” Ali al-Naimi told reporters today in Vienna when asked about the balance of supply […]

US, Mexico energy trade in flux

Energy trade between the US and Mexico is in flux with rising crude production in the US, falling production in Mexico, and rising Mexican demand for gasoline, diesel, and other petroleum products. Mexico is the third-largest supplier of crude to the US, but last year shipments of Mexican crude to the US dropped to 972,000 […]

Saudi Aramco Says 2012 Output Rises to Record 9.51 MMbopd

State-owned Saudi Arabian Oil Co., or Aramco, saw its average crude production rise to 9.506 million barrels a day in 2012, the highest level in more than three decades, up from 9.067 million barrels a year earlier amid output outages in Libya and Western sanctions against Iranian crude. Recoverable and proven crude-oil and condensate reserves […]

Drilling Faster Just To Stay Still: A Proposal To Use ‘Production Per Unit Effort’ (PPUE) As An Indicator Of Peak Oil

Within the fields of harvest and fisheries management catch per unit effort (CPUE) is one method that is used to determine the health of a biological resource. The underlying assumption is that as a population declines it becomes harder to catch and therefore CPUE decreases. Effort can be measured in a number of ways. In […]

US shale boom starts to fade

The SMH has an article opining that prospects for US shale oil production are fading – US shale boom starts to fade. For the past three years, the boom in the US shale oil industry has outstripped all expectations. Production surged far faster than any forecasts; drillers raced to secure space in new pipelines to […]

OPEC May Keep Target as Oil Demand Set to Rise

OPEC may leave the group’s output target unchanged at Friday’s meeting in Vienna because increased demand in the next few months will help maintain the commodity’s price, a local energy analyst said. Members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries will review the 30 million barrels a day production ceiling as demand in the U.S. […]

Pemex: Output at 2.54 million bpd in first 4 months of 2013

Mexico City, May 25 (EFE).- Mexican state-owned oil company Petroleos Mexicanos said it produced an average of nearly 2.54 million barrels per day in the first four months of 2013, nearly half of which was destined for export. Of the average of 2,538,000 barrels produced per day, 54 percent was heavy crude, 33 percent light […]

Tech Talk – Cutting Back on Supply in the Presence of Optimism

We have reached, I would suppose, a period of complacency in the perception of the coming of Peak Oil. We are in a period where, as recent posts have shown, the promises of bountiful supply are built on increasingly tenuous propositions. Unfortunately, the evolving story of the mess that we are heading into is at […]

Are Pipeline Spills A Foregone Conclusion?

Exxon Mobil hasn’t asked federal regulatory authorities to restart the Pegasus oil pipeline, which burst open in a neighborhood in Mayflower, Ark.  In March, a 22-foot rupture in the pipeline spilled about 5,000 barrels of diluted Canadian crude oil into an area of marshland, though the company said it’s been effectively cleaning the area with […]

Towards Transparency in Oil, Gas and Mining

Natural resources are a large source of revenue for many countries, however, without good management local communities may not feel the benefits. The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), the global standard for transparency of revenues from natural resources, is holding its 2013 Global Conference in Sydney. The World Bank is a supporter of EITI which […]

April Saudi Oil Production

The above graph summarizes the data on Saudi oil production (and oil rig count on the right scale).  The feature of most current interest is the large production cut that was implemented in the last months of 2012 (more background here). It appears that in April there was a noticeable uptick in production of around […]

The Coming Deluge of Oil

It came without warning: A flood of oil. Just a few years ago we were talking about peak oil, the slow, painful demise of crude. Now there’s talk about a shock wave of new oil supply from North America that’s about to slam into global markets. We’re in the early stages of a new oil […]

Al-Qaeda takes over oilfields once belonging to Assad…

Al-Qaeda’s Syrian wing is helping to finance its activities by selling the product of oilfields that once helped to prop up the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Up to 380,000 barrels of crude oil were previously produced by wells around the city of Raqqa and in the desert region to its east that are now in […]

Ten Years After Invasion, Iraq Continues to Import Oil Products

Former Iraqi oil minister Issam al-Jalabi says that although Iraq is an oil-rich country, it still imports petroleum products from abroad to meet its needs 10 years after the US-led invasion of the country. Jalabi, an international energy expert, told Azzaman that annual imports of oil derivatives reached $6 billion a few years after the occupation. He said […]

Afghanistan to begin first commercial oil production

Afghanistan expects to begin the first commercial oil production in its history in a little under two months. The country’s mining minister, Wahidullah Shahrani, has told the ABC processing will start at the Amu Darya basin in Afghanistan’s north in July. The project is operated by the China National Petroleum Corporation and is expected to […]

A state-run monopoly is killing Mexico’s chances of oil independence

Any time a single company is responsible for nearly 10% of a country’s GDP, it’s a problem. Thanks to a lack of competition, Pemex, the Mexican oil company responsible for producing all of the country’s oil, has seen production fall steadily over the past decade. It’s a monopoly, man Since Pemex was nationalized 75 years […]

Arctic nations adopt marine oil pollution preparedness agreement

The world’s Arctic nations formally agreed to cooperate on marine oil pollution preparedness and response at the Arctic Council’s May 15 meeting in Kiruna, Sweden. The agreement, which was the second legally binding pact negotiated under the council’s auspices, also encourages future national, binational, and multinational contingency plans, training, and exercises to develop effective response […]

Canadian PM: Oil going to U.S. one way or another

A controversial oil pipeline to the U.S. Gulf Coast “absolutely needs to go ahead,” Canada’s prime minister said Thursday, and he warned that the oil will be transported through America one way or another. Stephen Harper addressed the Keystone XL project, a flashpoint in the debate over climate change, during a visit to New York […]

Production Falls as U.S. Feels Pull of Global Weakness

Industrial production declined in April by the most in eight months, indicating American manufacturers will provide little support for an economy beset by weaker global markets and federal budget cuts. The larger-than-forecast 0.5 percent decrease in output at factories, mines and utilities followed a revised 0.3 percent gain that was weaker than first reported, Federal […]

Oil Production in the Polar Regions

Today, the Arctic Council’s eight foreign ministers from Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Russia, Canada and the USA meet in Sweden to discuss, among other things, oil production in the Arctic. They will attempt to agree on a binding joint treaty regarding what preparations will exist in case of an oil spill/accident. The amount of […]

Kuwait: The Transformation Game

Kuwait’s first commercial production of oil began in 1946, some 65 years ago. Up until 1990, its production had been dominated by a few reservoirs. Burgan Al Kabeer Field (Greater Burgan) had the biggest share of the total production reaching 70-80 percent. At that time, all its production was natural flow, water free and average […]

Iraq Oil Exports Suspended after Attack

Exports of crude oil from northern Iraq have been suspended after a new bomb attack against a key pipeline, an Iraqi person familiar with the matter and a Middle East shipping agent said Tuesday, the second such interruption in less than a week. Iraq normally exports an average of 300,000 to 350,000 barrels a day […]

EA Sees U.S. Oil Shockwaves Displacing OPEC as Supply Driver

The U.S. shale boom will send “shockwaves” through the global oil trade over the next five years, benefiting the nation’s refiners and displacing OPEC as the driver of supply growth, the IEA said. North America will provide 40 percent of new supplies to 2018 through the development of light, tight oil and oil sands, while […]

The Illogic And Folly Of Peak Oil (Or Is It Peak Gas?) Alarmism

The “peak oil”, “peak gas”, or peak-whatever-you-want-to-call-it mini-movement continues on, despite all the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.   Last week it even made its way onto the Forbes.com website in the form of this piece authored by economist Robert U. Ayres.  This piece is so filled with illogic, factual errors and omissions of context that it requires a response. […]

BP Withdraws Staff from Libya

BP is withdrawing some of its staff from Libya amid potential violence in the country. BP said in a statement Sunday that it was withdrawing non-essential overseas staff out of Libya “as a precautionary measure” following advice given to it by the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office. However, BP said that its Libyan staff remain in […]

Old Technology Fuels New Energy Boom

With U.S. oil imports hitting a 17-year low, the mainstream media has awoken to the fact that, as I pointed out three years ago, peak oil is not happening anytime soon.  Charles Mann’s excellent cover story in this month’s Atlantic, “What If We Never Run Out of Oil?” focuses on an obscure, exotic, though potentially vast source of […]

How oil travels around the world, in one map

Here’s a neat map looking at how oil travels by sea around the globe — focusing on the key “choke points” where that oil supply is most vulnerable to attack: Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration That map comes from this recent reporting project on U.S. energy security by nine student journalists at the Medill National Security Journalism […]

Exxon and Qatar plan to ship US natural gas to Britain

Exxon Mobil and Qatar Petroleum announced an agreement on Thursday to ship liquefied natural gas to Britain from their proposed export plant in the United States, offering another supply stream to the island nation as domestic output dwindles. Under the deal, the companies would send up to 15.6 million tonnes of LNG each year to […]

No “Peak Natural Gas” Anytime Soon

One does not hear much these days about “peak oil”, as new technologies are developed and implemented that, together with market conditions, make feasible the exploitation of previously uneconomical or irretrievable deposits. A new report by the Diplomatic Center for Strategic Studies (DCSS), based in Kuwait, just published, confirms an International Energy Agency report from […]

Albert Oil-Sands Output Increased 10% in 2012

Alberta oil sands production increased 10 percent to 1.9 million barrels a day last year and will double to 3.8 million by 2022, the province’s energy regulator predicts. The increase came even as oil sands capital expenditures dipped 10 percent to C$20.4 billion ($20.35 billion) in 2012. Some companies cut budgets because of “increased pressure […]

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