(Bloomberg) If you ever find yourself at a cocktail party with a bunch of oil executives, one phrase is a guaranteed mood-killer: “reserve replacement.”Not merely awkward to say, it is the industry’s bogeyman. Because in a business chiefly concerned with getting stuff out of the ground, you need to replace that stuff pretty consistently unless you want to, well, eventually run out of stuff.Last year, the stuff-gathering did not go so well.
(Toronto Star) The much-anticipated rebalancing of oil markets appears to be a bit further away after the International Energy Agency revised its forecast, trimming its expectations for the growth in oil demand and citing near-record production by OPEC’s Middle East exporters.
The IEA said Tuesday that global oil demand is rising at a slower pace than expected, lowering its forecast by 100,000 barrels a day to an increase of 1.3 million barrels a day in 2016 and 1.2 million barrels a day in 2017.
(Wall Street Journal) A truck used to carry sand for fracking is washed in a truck stop on February 4, 2015 in Odessa, Texas. … Debt from U.S. shale companies has held its ground even as oil prices have beat a fast retreat, a sign the firms may have adapted to an era of cheaper crude and could remain key suppliers to the market.
A build-up in stockpiles of oil has renewed downward pressure on prices: U.S. crude is now at roughly $42 the barrel, 14% below where it was at the beginning of June, when it appeared to be rallying.
(oilprice.com) There has been a lot of pessimism among oil investors in recent months, and indeed the bear market over the last couple of years in black gold has destroyed many nest eggs. With that said, oil investors who have run for the hills could find themselves regretting that decision in the months and years to come.
(Reuters) Oil rallied on Monday, lifted by a wave of investor confidence and a weaker dollar after polls showed a diminishing chance that Britain may vote to leave the European Union later this week.
August Brent crude futures were up 90 cents at $50.07 a barrel by 0843 GMT, set for a gain of 6 percent in two trading days. NYMEX crude for July delivery, which expires on Tuesday, was up 80 cents at $48.78 a barrel.
(Reuters) Two years into the worst oil price rout in a generation, large and mid-sized U.S. independent producers are surviving and eyeing growth again as oil nears $50 a barrel, confounding OPEC and Saudi Arabia with their resiliency.
That shale giants Hess Corp ( HES.N ), Apache Corp ( APA.N ) and more than 25 other companies have beaten back OPEC’s attempt to sideline them would have been unthinkable just months ago, when oil plumbed $26 a barrel and collapses were feared.
(Bloomberg) Ultra Petroleum Corp. was a shale success story. A former penny stock that made the big leagues, it was worth almost $15 billion at its 2012 peak.
Then came the bust. Almost half of Ultra’s reserves were erased from its books this year. The company filed for bankruptcy on April 29 owing $3.9 billion.
(The Economic Times) India has surpassed Japan to become the world’s third-largest oil consumer, with its oil demand galloping 8.1 per cent in 2015, according to BP Statistical Review of World Energy released today.
With demand of 4.1 million barrels per day, India is the third-largest consumer behind US (19.39 million bpd) and China (11.96 million bpd). India accounted for 4.5 per cent of world oil consumption in 2015.
(Forbes) When Wood Mackenzie reported in the Fall that $1.5 trillion in potential global oil projects were uneconomic oil cost $51 a barrel, about what it costs now. The industry is making big cuts in CAPEX and upstream investments, and more than $200 billion in oil and gas investments evaporated in 2015. There’s still about 1.3 million b/d of surplus oil on the global market, and just the other day “OPEC Fails to Reach Agreement on Oil Production Ceiling.”
(New Scientist) THIS is a curious time to publish a biography of M. King Hubbert. The story of how this brilliant but irascible Shell geologist accurately forecast in 1956 that US oil production would peak and go into terminal decline by 1970 is by now well worn. Worse, after the supply crunch of 2008 that sent the price soaring to $147 per barrel and was widely mistaken for the global peak, the world is now swimming in oil once more, and the price languishes at around $50.
