(platts.com) The total US rig count, which on Friday stood at 476, is now at its lowest point ever in the 67-year history of the Baker Hughes numbers, according to data released by the oilfield service company.
That is down by four from last week and down from 1,069 working the same week in 2015 and a recent peak of 1,931 in late 2014. The previous low was 488 in April 1999, Baker Hughes records show.
(artberman.com) The oil-price rally that began in mid-February will almost certainly collapse.
It is similar to the false March-June 2015 rally. In both cases, prices increased largely because of sentiment. As in the earlier rally, current storage volumes are too large and demand is too weak to sustain higher prices for long.
(Bloomberg) Even as it pumps near-record quantities of oil, Saudi Arabia is getting ready for a time when the world will no longer need its biggest export.
The world’s largest crude exporter is focusing on renewable-energy sources such as solar power in preparation for a post-oil global economy, Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi said at a conference in Berlin on Thursday.
(NY Times) When the Obama administration unveiled a proposal in January 2015 to open the southeastern Atlantic coast to oil and gas drilling for the first time, environmental advocates were shocked and enraged — and the oil industry was delighted.
The emotions were the same, just on opposite sides of the energy-environmental divide, when the Interior Department announced Tuesday that the administration was yanking Atlantic drilling off the table. And almost everyone was shocked.
(NY Times) It was one of the darkest periods of the oil market slump. The global economy was showing fresh signs of slowing, and crude prices were collapsing so steeply that virtually every well in America was unprofitable.
But when Diamondback Energy went out to raise $226 million worth of new stock that week in the middle of January, the oil and gas company found more buyers than it could accommodate. It had to nearly double the amount of shares it sold, to four million.
(Bloomberg) The top of the oil market may be closer than you think.
With Brent futures having bounced back as high as $41 a barrel, the International Energy Agency sees “ light at the end of the tunnel ,” and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is spotting “green shoots.” Even so, many analysts warn that, like the failed rally last year, this recovery will sputter once prices go high enough to keep U.S. crude flowing.
“I’ve covered this industry since the late 70s and I would have to say I haven’t seen a situation like this, of this magnitude. We’ve concluded that this is not a normal cyclical downturn.”
Carol Cowan, a Moody’s senior analyst
“Shale was a hot growth area and companies made the mistake of borrowing too much. It’s amazing that so many people were willing to lend them money. Many are going to file for bankruptcy, and bondholders and equity are going to get wiped out en masse.”
George Schultze, founder and chief investment officer of Schultze Asset Management in New York
Oil prices continued to move higher last week closing at $38.50 in New York and $40.39 in London, up 7.2 and 4.3 percent respectively for the week. The two-month surge which has taken oil prices up some 45 percent started with reports in January that Russia and the Saudis were trying to bring major oil producers together to agree on a production freeze. This idea is now fading as Iran adamantly refuses to freeze production and no other exporters seem willing to cede current customers to Tehran. The impetus for the price increase now is focusing on forecasts that low prices could lead to a decline of some 750,000 b/d in non-OPEC oil production this year – mostly in the US. Some of this could, of course, be offset by increased Iranian exports. Tehran had hoped to increase production and exports by 1 million b/d this year but is having difficulty finding customers and increasing production. A weaker US dollar also contributed to the oil price increase last week.
(Bloomberg) The upturn in U.S. core inflation and rise in oil prices are causing money to pour into a trade that was one of Wall Street’s favorites heading into 2016, according to Société Générale SA.
Late in 2015, strategists at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., and Morgan Stanley—to name a few—were pounding the table on Treasury inflation-protected securities, based on the belief that market-based measures of price pressures over the medium term were far too subdued.
(Bloomberg) In January 2012, I traveled to Oklahoma City for the first time to report on what was considered a surprising development: a U.S. oil boom. Until then, hydraulic fracturing—aka fracking—was best known for boosting U.S. natural gas production. It was just starting to be used to unlock oil trapped in deep underground layers of rock like the Bakken Shale in North Dakota, the Eagle Ford in Texas, and the Mississippi Lime in Oklahoma.
