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Peak Oil Review – 28 Mar 2016

Oil prices finished a holiday-shortened trading week on Thursday relatively unchanged. Oil had been a bit higher on Monday and Tuesday but then underwent a $2 a barrel decline on Wednesday after the weekly stocks report showed a 9.4-million-barrel increase in the US crude inventory. Prices recovered by a dollar or so on Thursday to close at $39 in New York and $40 in London, partly in response to a 15-unit drop in the US oil rig count. The 50 percent price increase since January still seems to be based mostly on unrealistic expectations that the large oil exporters will cut production enough to bring supply and demand back into balance. So far, however, crude stocks have continued to rise, and production cuts have been minimal.

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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Oil Price May Have Bottomed Out But China’s Flat Demand Spells Trouble

(Forbes) As the Brent front-month futures contract stabilizes either side of the $40 per barrel level, and WTI lurks within that range too, a comment by the International Energy Agency that the “oil price may have bottomed out” has triggered a lot of market interest.

In its monthly oil forecast for March, the IEA, which advises on energy policy matters of industrialized nations, noted that non-OPEC oil production would fall by 750,000 barrels per day (bpd) in 2016, compared with its previous estimate of 600,000 bpd. Specifically, US production is forecast to decline by 530,000 bpd this year.

Posted On : Published By : aspo-usa
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The big bust in the oil fields

(Washington Post) Tilden, Tex. — He’d borrowed from banks and investors and retirement funds, all in a frenzied mission to drill for oil and gas, and by the time Terry Swift realized he’d gone too far, this was his debt: $1.349 billion.

His company, founded by his father almost 40 years earlier, had plunged into bankruptcy and laid off 25 percent of its staff. Its shares had been pulled from the New York Stock Exchange. And now Swift was in a company Chevrolet Tahoe, driving back to the flat and dusty place where his bets had gone bust.

Posted On : Published By : aspo-usa
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IMF: Oil Prices And The Global Economy – It’s Complicated

(Seeking Alpha) By Maurice Obstfeld, economic counsellor and director of research at the International Monetary Fund; Gian Maria Milesi-Ferretti, deputy director in the Research Department of the International Monetary Fund; and Rabah Arezki, chief of the Commodities Unit in the IMF Research Department

Oil prices have been persistently low for well over a year and a half now, but as the April 2016 World Economic Outlook will document, the widely anticipated ” shot in the arm ” for the global economy has yet to materialize.

Posted On : Published By : aspo-usa
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Why North-American Oil Is Positioned To Win In The Long-Run

(oilprice.com) Did U.S. investors complete the U.S. E&P’s revolutionary transformation of the global oil market at the end of February?

Very possibly, yes. At a time when oil companies large, medium, and small were cutting more from 2016 capex budgets, Americans were expressing their confidence in the U.S. E&P’s sector’s future, pouring $9.2 billion in new equity into the beleaguered sector.

Posted On : Published By : aspo-usa
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An Unlikely Victim Of Oil’s Collapse: Krispy Kreme

(Forbes) Despite humble beginnings in North Carolina, Krispy Kreme has bet big on international expansion in recent years, with nearly three quarters of its 1,100 donut shops now located abroad.

Yet, with plunging oil prices wreaking havoc around the world, there are some places where it probably wishes it hadn’t set up shop.

Posted On : Published By : aspo-usa
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Drillers Can’t Replace Lost Output as $100 Oil Inheritance Spent

(Bloomberg) Here’s Why This Is Only the Fourth Time Oil Has Tanked. For oil companies, the legacy of $100 crude is starting to run dry.

A wave of projects approved at the start of the decade, when oil traded near $100 a barrel, has bolstered output for many producers, keeping cash flowing even as prices plummeted. Now, that production boon is fading. In 2016, for the first time in years, drillers will add less oil from new fields than they lose to natural decline in old ones.

About 3 million barrels a day will come from new projects this year, compared with 3.3 million lost from established fields, according to Oslo-based Rystad Energy AS.

Posted On : Published By : aspo-usa
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Peak Oil Review – 21 Mar 2016

The price rally that has been on-going since mid-February continued last week with US futures closing Friday at $39.44 a barrel, up 2.4 percent for the week, and London futures closing at $41.20 up 2 percent. Last week the move came from a combination of what one analyst termed a “brilliant communications strategy” and other developments that normally lead to higher prices. The “brilliant communications strategy,” of course, is the meeting in April during which those countries that either cannot or do not want to increase oil production are supposed to agree not to increase their production. During the week, Moscow even hinted that Iran might join the group after it increases its oil output to 4 million b/d, a goal that might take many months or even years to reach. The producers now are scheduled to meet on 17 April in Qatar; the meeting is being heralded as the first agreement to limit global oil production in 15 years even though it is unlikely to have any real impact on oil production.

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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What Happened to Peak Oil?

(greentechmedia.com) Peak oil is the point at which global oil production peaks and can only go down. M. King Hubbert developed the theory of peak oil after observing this pattern in individual oil fields and then extrapolating these trends to the U.S., accurately predicting a peak in U.S. production by 1970.

But in the last few years, as U.S. oil production has dramatically ramped up, many peak oil believers have been left looking a bit silly.

Posted On : Published By : aspo-usa