Category: quotes

[The Trump administration stated there is a “reduced the urgency of the US to conserve energy.”] I strongly disagree with this argument. It isn’t certain that the US will become a net exporter of petroleum and petroleum products, but in any case, that’s not a reason to forego conservation. There are economic reasons, national security reasons, and environmental reasons for conserving oil.”

Robert Rapier, energy industry commentator

“[T]he fortunes of energy companies are highly dependent on a single, highly-salient, well-understood, widely-available, plausibly exogenous factor – the price of oil….This is a market where firm value hinges to a large degree on observable luck, so the fact that we observe little filtering of luck from [the size of] executive pay is particularly striking.”

Lucas W. Davis and Catherine Hausman, the Energy Institute in Haas

“The [California] legislature finds and declares that the Public Utilities Commission, State Energy Resources Conservation and Development Commission, and State Air Resources Board should plan for 100 percent of total retail sales of electricity in California to come from eligible renewable energy resources and zero-carbon resources by December 31, 2045.”

Senate Bill 100 reads

[In Mexico] “Production peaked in 2004/2005 at just over 3.5 million b/d, so the overall decline is approaching 50%…Only three years since 1999 have had reserve replacement ratios greater than 100%. Many years’ numbers have actually been negative, some of them significantly so, and the estimated ultimate recovery has been revised slightly downwards overall.”

George Kaplan, oil industry analyst

“Climate change is no longer coming, it’s here. And we are living with it every day.”

Geisha Williams, CEO of PG&E, wrote in an email, hoping to offload some of the blame for several of the last 12 months’ fires from PG&E itself.

“A ballot measure requiring greater setbacks could have a dramatic effect on drilling in Colorado. In Weld County, Colorado, where much of the drilling in Colorado’s DJ Basin takes place, the greater setback distances would put roughly 78 percent of the surface land off limits to drilling. ‘That is effectively a ban on the industry,” Dan Haley, president of the Colorado Oil & Gas Association, told Bloomberg in a July interview. “You’d basically have no new wells drilled in Colorado.’”

Nick Cunningham, Oilprice.com

“Weekly data had shown a strong 324,000 b/d output rise [in US oil production] from March to May. The revised data shows that this rise was a mirage: output actually fell 19,000 b/d over the period. It is time to deal with the statistical gorilla on the oil trading floor. We think US crude oil production has not reached the 11 million b/d shown in recent weeks in the Energy Information Administration weekly data, and that it is significantly below 11mb/d, with growth slowing.”

Paul Horsnell, head of commodities research at Standard Chartered

“The economic collapse I predict will occur because the world’s petroleum industry lacks the capacity needed to supply additional low-sulfur fuel to the shipping industry [in 2020] while meeting the requirements of existing customers such as farmers, truckers, railroads, and heavy equipment operators.”

Phillip Verleger, oil industry economist, and analyst

“Climate change is a fact of life, as is not contested by Defendants. But the serious problems caused thereby are not for the judiciary to ameliorate. Global warming and solutions thereto must be addressed by the two other branches of government.”

US District Judge John Keenan in Manhattan, in dismissing a lawsuit by New York City against major oil companies

“Our goal is to increase pressure on the Iranian regime by reducing to zero its revenue from crude oil sales.”

Brian Hook, US State Dept, director of policy planning

[About climate-related class action lawsuits against Big Oil:] “It’s sort of bizarre that the users of our [petroleum] products say: ‘Well actually we didn’t want your product. So why did you force it on us?’ I don’t think also that in the end it will solve anything other than maybe redistributing wealth to a certain class of the economy.”

Ben van Beurden, CEO of Royal Dutch Shell [Environmentalists counter that this resembles the reaction of Big Tobacco to class action lawsuits decades ago.]

“So, the peak oil theorists got lucky in that the industry experienced a large number of supply disruptions that raised prices, which seemed to confirm their arguments—just as the Iranian Oil Crisis of 1979 incorrectly convinced many that ever-higher crude prices were unavoidable and resource optimists naive. But by understanding that supply disruptions in Iraq, Libya, Venezuela and so on were responsible for higher prices, it is possible to recognize that political trends in oil exporting countries will determine prices, not resource scarcity. Recognizing the former means coping with cyclical prices, believing in the latter means getting blindsided by every major price decline.”

Michael Lynch, energy economist, from Forbes magazine article—“Whatever Happened to Peak Oil?”

“To the extent that developing countries aspire to reach motorization levels comparable to those in developed countries, the number of vehicles will likely continue to climb rapidly. We in the developed countries cannot successfully argue that the mobility afforded to us by personal vehicles is something to be curtailed in the developing countries for the benefit of us all. As a consequence, the required raw materials and energy will challenge our resources, and the resulting vehicle emissions will strain our ecological systems.”

Michael Sivak, former director of Sustainable Worldwide Transportation at the University of Michigan (6/12)

“Climate change is a global problem with grave implications: environmental, social, economic, political and for the distribution of goods.”

Pope Francis, who will meet with Big Oil execs the week of June 11, from a 2015 statement

“Since the beginning of the shale revolution a decade ago, the world has discovered 110 billion barrels of oil. Meanwhile, consumption has totaled 360 billion barrels. This 250 billion barrel deficit between discoveries and consumption seems sure to grow in the years ahead, given recent oil discovery trends.
“It is understandable why people would be complacent about this scenario. After all, didn’t the world face similar risks a decade ago, only to have shale oil save the day? But it isn’t clear that there is another ‘shale oil miracle’ that is ready to save the day. There are indeed more high-cost oil resources out there that can be developed, but these projects take a long time to complete. That’s why we can look out two to three years and see an impending supply crunch. The longer investments in the industry remain depressed, the more unavoidable this scenario becomes.”

Robert Rapier, a chemical engineer and industry commentator (3/23/18, in Forbes magazine)

“”My estimate is that about 70% of the good quality drilling locations [in the Bakken and Eagle Ford shale plays] have already been drilled. So you’re left with Tier 2, and Tier 3 quality geologic locations, and there’s a really steep drop-off in the amount of oil you get per well with those locations.” Even though technology and well completion techniques have improved per-well yields, “that doesn’t offset bad rock. I expect by the August [earnings conference] calls, to see some independents temper their 2018 growth forecasts. They’ll couch it in terms of unavailability of service equipment, difficulty getting crews or logistical issues, but that will be code for ‘I’m having disappointing well results because I’m having to drill Tier 2 and 3 geologic locations’.”

Mark Papa, former CEO of shale producer EOG Resources and currently CEO of small-cap Centennial Resource Development.

“Despite the welcome improvements in efficiency and innovation from companies operating in the North Sea, the ongoing decline in our offshore gas production has meant that the UK has gone from being a net exporter of gas in 2003 to importing over half (53%) of gas supplies in 2017 and estimates suggest we could be importing 72% of our gas by 2030.”

Greg Clark, Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, and James Brokenshire, the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities, and Local Government, in a joint statement

“Debt has made things seem affordable by selling our energy future forward. This led to the miracle of tight oil and shale gas… The best years are behind us. The growth is done.”

Art Berman, geologist, commenting on shale oil production in Texas

“Hopefully we won’t see the continued exodus of quality workers and equipment from the Gulf.”

Matt McCarroll, Fieldwood Energy CEO, commenting on a “new attitude” toward US Gulf of Mexico operators among federal government regulators and the White House.

“The migration towards the electrification of society is unstoppable.”

Lord John Browne, former CEO of BP

In Canada, Kinder Morgan Canada Ltd wants to almost triple the capacity of its Trans Mountain pipeline from Alberta to the Pacific province of British Columbia, which strongly opposes the idea on environmental grounds. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said, “I have asked the finance minister to engage in discussions, financial discussions, with Kinder Morgan and that’s exactly what is going on. We will ensure that this pipeline gets built in a way that upholds and protects the interests of Canadians. “This pipeline will get built.” (4/20)

“US dry gas production is projected to rise to an all-time high of 81.7 billion cubic feet per day (bcfd) in 2018, but US consumption is also expected to hit an all-time high of 78.2 bcfd in 2018. With exports rising to record highs as well, it does not leave a lot of extra gas to go into storage.”

Scott DiSavino, Reuters

“We feel the current [natural gas] market has become far too complacent and that prices are simply too low to account for demand growth and the amount of gas needed in storage for the next winter heating season.”

Martin King, director institutional research at GMP FirstEnergy in Calgary

“Since the beginning of the shale revolution a decade ago, the world has discovered 110 billion barrels of oil. Meanwhile, consumption has totaled 360 billion barrels. This 250-billion-barrel deficit between discoveries and consumption seems sure to grow in the years ahead, given recent oil discovery trends. It is understandable why people would be complacent about this scenario. After all, didn’t the world face similar risks a decade ago, only to have shale oil save the day? But it isn’t clear that there is another “shale oil miracle” that is ready to save the day. There are indeed more high-cost oil resources out there that can be developed, but these projects take a long time to complete. That’s why we can look out two to three years and see an impending supply crunch. The longer investments in the industry remain depressed, the more unavoidable this scenario becomes.”

Robert Rapier, oil industry writer/commentator (4/3)

[In Europe] “One in every three cars registered in February 2018 was an SUV. Small and mid-size SUVs led the growth for the segment in February, whilst compact SUVs also had a strong month.”

Green Car Congress

“Mark Papa, the former CEO of EOG Resources, and who has probably been presented more technical data pertaining to shale oil than anyone, believes that shale oil growth potential may be over-stated as the prime areas of the Eagle Ford and Bakken are already drilled up. The question is how far does the Permian have left. Probably a couple of years.”

Randy Evanchuk, P. Eng., retired from oil operations in 2015

“Now that I have retired, I have begun to look at the whole [nuclear] fusion enterprise more dispassionately, and I feel that a working, every-day, commercial fusion reactor would cause more problems than it would solve.”

Daniel Jassby, a research physicist who worked on nuclear fusion experiments for 25 years at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab in New Jersey (3/19)