Category: quotes

“When it comes to scarce resources, the simplest solutions on the surface are not always the best ones. You have to change people’s behavior, reassess society’s dependency on this resource and reduce consumption—otherwise society may, in fact, be more vulnerable to catastrophes than safer, despite clever solutions.”

Linda Kuil, Vienna Technology University, in a study on Mayan civilization and water resource constraint

“The notion of ‘rig productivity’ has to be taken with caution. We can’t assume that the best-posted performance in the field is the norm for all wells…There is a statistical distortion at play. Starting in late 2014, the severe downturn in oil prices forced the industry to park three-quarters of their rigs and ‘high-grade’ their inventory of prospects. Producers focused on only their best rocks, drilling with only the most efficient rigs. All the low productivity stuff was culled out of the statistical sampling, skewing the average productivity numbers much higher.”

Peter Tertzakian, Chief Energy Economist, and Managing Director at ARC Financial Corp

“If we are to believe Lux Research, Big Oil should use the cash it has, while it still has it, to enter the energy storage market. It has become abundantly clear that lying low and waiting for oil prices to reach former heights is useless since nobody can say with certainty whether or even if this will happen at all.
“If we are to believe Big Oil, all is well, and crude will soon jump back to $100 a barrel to the joy of shareholders all around. If it doesn’t, Big Oil will just continue cutting costs and maintaining dividends. The problem with this approach is that it’s unsustainable over the long term. This is just basic survival, while in the meantime, other leaner, more far-seeing companies [like France’s Total] bet on a future in renewable energy.”

Irina Slav, Oilprice.com

“The North America market has turned. We expect to see a continued modest uptick in the U.S. rig count during the second half of the year.”

Dave Lesar, Halliburton CEO said two weeks ago

[Among drillers] “There is a lot of hope, but hope is not a plan. Companies keep saying we can make money at $45 oil but these companies do not put their money where their mouth is.” Below $55 a barrel, about half of U.S. oil production is “uneconomic,” according to

Fadel Gheit, an Oppenheimer & Co. energy strategist in New York

“When oil prices crashed in the 1980s, the same thing that is happening today occurred in the industry then: companies went out of business and workers were laid off. And because there were few job openings, very few young people between the mid-1980s and 2000 went into oil and gas. As a result, much of the workforce that stuck around is now aging and moving closer to retirement, setting up the industry for a labor crunch, or the ‘Great Crew Change,’ as some dub it. There are too few experienced professionals to replace retiring workers.”

Nick Cunningham, Oilprice.com

“[India’s] fuel demand is rising, and India’s excess capacity is very small. We all need to expand if demand sustains.”

Sanjiv Singh, director of refineries at India’s biggest processor

“Electricity generation is a significant consumer of water: it consumes more than five times as much water globally as domestic uses (drinking, preparing food, bathing, washing clothes and dishes, flushing toilets and the rest) and more than five times as much water globally as industrial production…If policymakers fail to take into account the links between energy and water, we may come to a point in many parts of the world where it is water availability that is the main determinant of the energy sources available for use.”

Gary Bilotta, University of Brighton

“The disturbing truth is that the real cost of oil production has doubled since the 1990s. That is very bad news for the global economy. Those who believe that technology is always the answer need to think about that…Tight oil may have bought us a few years of abundance but the resulting over-supply, debt and prolonged period of prices below the cost of production have exacted a terrible cost. Under-investment, a damaged service sector, weak oil company balance sheets and a decimated work force practically ensure cripplingly higher prices a few years in the future.”

Art Berman, consulting geologist

“The embattled crude oil and natural gas industry worldwide has slashed capital spending to a point below the minimum required levels to replace reserves — replacement of proved reserves in the past constituted about 80 percent of the industry’s spending; however, the industry has slashed its capital spending by a total of about 50 percent in 2015 and 2016. According to Deloitte’s new study, “Short of Capital? Risk of underinvestment in Oil and Gas is amplified by competing cash priorities,” this underinvestment will quickly deplete the future availability of reserves and production.”

The BOE Report

On the Canadian oil sands: “It is not a growth sector, and one of the issues particularly for the oil sands is, if you’re sitting in London or New York or Hong Kong or Tokyo and you’re running institutional money, are you really going to think about being a shareholder in something that’s going to cost billions, take 10 to 15 to 20 years to realize a return and be in the high-cost production when price is under pressure and global growth is slow? I don’t think so…. In general, we’re the [world’s] high-cost producer…. And in a US$50 [oil market] … we’re just not competitive.”

John Stephenson, CEO of Stephenson & Co.