Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Chevron, crude oil, energy, Exxon, fracking, James Hamilton, oil, oil production, peak oil, Royal Dutch Shell, Shell, WSJ
via James Hamilton via WSJ: http://econbrowser.com/archives/2014/01/big-oil-companies-spending-more-and-producing-less
click to enlarge
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Brent crude, energy, North Sea, offshore oil production, oil production, peak oil, UK
Long peaked, declining rapidly and getting really expensive.
The sharp decline in production of oil and gas from under British waters is “worrying” industry leaders.
Trade body Oil and Gas UK says there is record investment this year of £13.5bn.
But its annual report on the industry’s economic impact highlights the sharp fall in output of 19% during 2011 and 14% in 2012.
It says the industry’s latest estimates of the continuing decline suggest a further fall of at least 8.5% during this year, with no recovery next year.
[…]
Because of challenging geology and unplanned shutdowns on offshore platforms, the unit cost per barrel for extracting oil from British waters, known as the UK Continental Shelf (UKCS), has gone up four-fold over the past decade.
via BBC News – 'Worrying' decline in oil and gas production.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: crude oil, Egypt, energy, oil exports, oil production, peak oil
via Energy Export Databrowser:
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 4th Amendment, energy costs, gas prices, Mark Udall, oil production, Randy Udall, Wyden
“Our people want to know why the flood of new domestic crude oil isn’t lowering prices at the pump,” said Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. “There is no question that the lower oil costs are not getting through to Americans’ wallets.”
via Senators Grill Refiners Over High Prices Amid Oil Boom – Bloomberg.
If Wyden is this clueless about energy — what “lower oil costs”? — it does not give a fellar confidence that he is an effective guardian of civil liberties (Wyden is on the Senate Intelligence Committee which is supposedly a check on the executive branch’s surveillance fetish). Is he just trying to get someone from the industry to admit the truth, or is he really that out of it.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: deepwater drilling, EIA, fracking, IEA, liquid fuel production, oil price, oil price predictions, oil production, Peak Demand, peak oil, refinery gain, shale oil, tight gas, tight oil
Via Kurt Cobb in the CS Monitor:
Back in the year 2000, the IEA divined that by 2010, liquid fuel production worldwide would reach 95.8 million barrels per day (mbpd). The actual 2010 number was 87.1 mbpd. The agency further forecast an average daily oil price of $28.25 per barrel (adjusted for inflation). The actual average daily price of oil traded on the New York Mercantile Exchange in 2010 was $79.61
[…]
So, what made the IEA so sanguine about oil supply growth in the year 2000? It cited the revolution taking place in deepwater drilling technology which was expected to allow the extraction of oil supplies ample for the world’s needs for decades to come. But, deepwater drilling has turned out to be more challenging than anticipated and has not produced the bounty the IEA imagined it would. …
via When oil forecasts get it wrong – CSMonitor.com.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Bakken, enegy, frack, fracking, IEA, oil journalism, oil production, oil shale, oil supply, Peak Demand, peak oil, shale oil, tight oil, Tom Gjelten
As NPR’s Tom Gjelten reports:
“Petroleum engineers have always known about the untapped underground oil in the United States, but it was unreachable, trapped in tight shale rock. Then the engineers figured out how to crack the rock. Hydraulic fracturing — fracking — got that ‘tight oil’ finally flowing in places like North Dakota.”
via Huge Boost In U.S. Oil Output Set To Transform Global Market : The Two-Way : NPR.
Wrong, Tom. The tight oil has been ‘reachable’ for several decades, it was just such an expensive process that it made no sense to do it when oil was cheap — a money-losing proposition. Now, all the cheap oil is gone, and out comes the ‘unconventional’ oil.
Gjelten also said that the decline in oil consumption in the US was due to efficiency (check the VMT chart Tom). There was no mention of depletion of existing fields, or the striking decline rate of fracked shale wells. And he reported that cheaper oil is just over the horizon.
Would it hurt Mr. Gjelten to do just a tiny bit of research on the topic of his reports so he doesn’t sound like a complete idiot?
Filed under: maps | Tags: Assem Abou Ibrahim, EEZ, Lebanon, licensing, MEOW, MEW, oil and gas exploration, oil exploration, oil production, PA
…has never been explored for hydrocarbons.
On behalf of the newly formed Petroleum Administration (PA), I would like to welcome you to this website that will focus on matters related to the 1st licensing round for hydrocarbon exploration within the Lebanese offshore EEZ (Exclusive Economic Zone). The PA would also like to thank the Ministry of Energy and Water (MEW) for its continued support during the transition process.
via LEB Licensing Round.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Bakken, CH4, fracking, horizontal drilling, Natural gas, natural gas flaring, North Dakota, oil production, shale oil, taxes, tight gas, tight oil
Rampant waste and environmental degradation have been part of the Bakken boom. The state doesn’t care about that, but it wants its taxes.
Helms estimates that about 30% of the gas produced in the state is flared, since development of takeaway infrastructure has not matched the pace of drilling.
Producers are currently allowed to flare gas for a year without paying royalties. The new bill would extend that tax-exempt period for two more years if an operator can collect at least 75% of the produced gas.
via N. Dakota tax bills pique industry interest – Upstreamonline.com.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: cost of extraction, energy, Kurt Cobb, Natural gas, oil production, peak oil
Here and there on occasion. Kurt Cobb in the CSM:
Currently, there appears to be no new transformative on-the-shelf technology that will significantly reduce the cost of extracting oil and natural gas. And so, barring a deep economic depression, we can look forward to prices for oil and natural gas that are consistently above the cost of production and therefore far above the bizarrely low forecasts in the air today. In fact, we should expect costs to continue to escalate as we seek out resources that are ever more difficult to extract and refine.
via Natural gas, oil prices: why the long-term forecasts are wrong – CSMonitor.com.
Filed under: maps | Tags: Argentina, BHP Billiton, Borders and Southern Petroleum, cute wars, Falkland Islands, Malvinas, North Sea, oil production, Rockhopper, Sea Lion, UK oil production
From oilvoice.com: http://www.oilvoice.com/n/Falkland_Islands_The_New_North_Sea/614e4d43b.aspx
The prospect of the Falkland Islands developing into a major oil producing region has captured the imagination of geologists and investors alike for decades. For many, the area has significant potential as a new ‘North Sea’, bringing opportunities for oil and services companies for years to come. The exploration area surrounding the Falklands to which the UK has a territorial claim is some fifty percent larger than the UK’s portion of the North Sea. In fact, despite being thousands of miles apart there are many similarities between the two. Environmental conditions and water depth are comparable to those west of the Shetland Islands, whilst in terms of geology the basins of the Falkland Islands possess structures similar to those found in the North Sea. The exploration area itself is separated into the geologically distinct North Basin, where the Sea Lion discovery was made, and the South Basin where fellow explorers Falkland Oil & Gas and Borders and Southern Petroleum intend to embark on their own campaign from the end of 2011 having secured an additional rig.
Despite the recent success, there are still those who doubt the Falkland Islands will ever see large scale oil production.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Alaska, Beaufort Sea, Coast Guard, energy, Kulluk, oil production, peak oil, Royal Dutch Shell, Shell
‘Season full of headaches:’
Adding to a season full of headaches for Shell Alaska’s debut offshore-drilling program in the U.S. Arctic, the company’s Kulluk drill rig was stuck Friday in monster seas off the coast of Alaska as its tugboat’s engines failed and the Coast Guard cutter that came to assist became entangled in a towline.
There were no immediate threats to crew or equipment, but Shell Alaska was rushing additional aid vessels to the scene as the Kulluk, which drilled the beginnings of an exploratory oil well in the Beaufort Sea over the summer, sat without ability to move forward in 20-foot seas about 50 miles south of Kodiak.
via Coast Guard cutter hits trouble trying to aid Shell rig off Alaska | Local News | The Seattle Times.
Don’t freak out, but this is what Peak Oil For All Intents And Purposes looks like.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Chris Martenson, frac, fracking, narrative, oil production, technology
Chris Martenson: Well, this is really important. The current story is something along these lines: “Hey, look at how clever we’ve been. Because of the magic of technology, we have discovered how to unlock these incredible oil and gas resources that we just didn’t even know about before.”
When I talk to people who are in the oil business, they say, “Oh, no, no, we’ve known about those shale deposits, we’ve been drilling into and through them for decades. We’ve had horizontal drilling for decades; we’ve had fracking for decades. What we haven’t had is $80-a-barrel oil reliably enough to support us going into those with those technologies.”
So what really unlocked those reserves was price. Not technology, not cleverness, not ingenuity. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of very clever, ingenious stuff going on in those drilling actions, but price was the primary driver here.
via Conservation Not Technology will be our Savior – Chris Martenson (Part 2) « naked capitalism.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 2012, 2019, AEO table browser, EIA, energy, Hubbert, oil predictions, oil production, peak oil, U.S. crude oil production
7.54 mbd of crude in 2019. According to the EIA’s “AEO Table Browser:”
AEO Table Browser – Energy Information Administration.
See also: THE AMAZING RED MOUND, BAKKEN DEVELOPMENT BY COUNTY, EPA FRACKING AIR POLLUTION RULES, MONTANA CRUDE OIL PRODUCTION, LIVESTOCK IN FRACKING REGIONS
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Econbrowser, James Hamilton, luck, oil production, peak oil, production, technology, the Cult of Technology
What if our technology had more to do with luck than our luck had to do with technology?
James Hamilton:
My view is that with these new fields and new technology, we’ll see further increases in U.S. and world production of oil for the next several years. But, unlike many other economists, I do not expect that to continue for much beyond the next decade. We like to think that the reason we enjoy our high standard of living is because we have been so clever at figuring out how to use the world’s available resources. But we should not dismiss the possibility that there may also have been a nontrivial contribution of simply having been quite lucky to have found an incredibly valuable raw material that was relatively easy to obtain for about a century and a half.
via Economics in Action : Issue 7 : November 15, 2012 : Exhaustible Resources and Economic Growth.
Yeah.. Don’t dismiss that possibility.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: biology, China, Chinese energy production, energy, energy production, fracking, oil production, peak oil, water, water pollution
Everyone knows that oil and gas are more important than water. Right?
If fracking takes off in China as planned, it will likely exacerbate the nation’s existing water crisis. “Most of the nation’s shale gas lies in areas plagued by water shortages,” the report says. With about 20 percent of the world’s population and only 6 percent of the world’s water resources, China is one of the least water-secure countries in the world. Its water shortages are made worse by pollution: According to the Ministry of Water Resources about 40 percent of China’s rivers were so polluted they were deemed unfit for drinking, while about 300 million rural residents lack access to safe drinking water each year.
via China planning 'huge fracking industry' | Environment | guardian.co.uk.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: energy production, hydraulic fracturing, North Dakota, Oil Drum, oil production, peak oil, Rune Likvern, tacos, tight gas, tight oil
via a comment by Rune Likvern at the Oil Drum: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/9648#comment-931584
click to enlarge
looks a little peaky…probably just a temporary hitch… don’t be alarmed…
Note: the Bakken shale is in Montana as well as North Dakota.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Bakken, crude oil, demand destruction, energy, fracking, IEA, KSA, mbd, oil consumption, oil production, Our Finite World, refinery gain, Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabian oil production, shale gas, shale oil, tight gas, tight oil, Tvberg, Tverberg, unconventional oil, US oil production, WEO, World Energy Outlook
The happy talk on future production is crazier than ever in the latest IEA World Energy Outlook, but there are also some stunningly pessimistic predictions buried inside. Wild!
For instance: The US will become number one oil producuh again and rediscover our lost oil-producing prowess with about 11 million barrels/day (Yay!) — which must mean Saudi Arabia won’t approach IEA’s previous prediction for that country of roughly 15 mbd output (Ooof). And the predicted exporter status of the US (Yay!) relies as much on a huge drop in consumption as it does on increases in production (Ooof). So it’s a bit of a sad day in IEA land, where consumption always went up, up, up.
From Tverberg:
The International Energy Agency (IEA) provides unrealistically high oil forecasts in its new 2012 World Energy Outlook (WEO). It claims, among other things, that the United States will become the world’s largest oil producer by 2020, and will become a net oil exporter by 2030.
Figure 1. Author’s interpretation of IEA Forecast of Future US Oil Production under “New Policies” Scenario, based on information provided in IEA’s 2012 World Energy Outlook.
Figure 1 shows that this increase comes solely from the expected rise in tight oil production and natural gas liquids. The idea that we will become an exporter in later years occurs despite falling production, because “demand” will drop so much.
Note that IEA and other maniacs add NGLs, biodiesel and even ‘refinery gain’ to the US oil production number, in a crude attempt to fool y’all.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: BP, deepwater drilling, energy, GOM, holding station, Hurricane Isaac, jackups, oil production, oil supply, peak oil, platforms, rigs, shut in, Transocean, US oil production
Updated August 30. Almost all of Gulf shut down.
Based on data from offshore operator reports submitted as of 11:30 a.m. CDT today, personnel have been evacuated from a total of 509 production platforms, equivalent to 85.4 percent of the 596 manned platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. Production platforms are the structures located offshore from which oil and natural gas are produced. Unlike drilling rigs, which typically move from location to location, production facilities remain in the same location throughout a project’s duration.
Personnel have been evacuated from 50 rigs, equivalent to 65.79 percent of the 76 rigs currently operating in the Gulf. Rigs can include several types of self-contained offshore drilling facilities including jackup rigs, submersibles and semisubmersibles.
via BSEE Hurricane Isaac Activity Statistics: August 30, 2012 | BSEE.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Athabasca Oil Sands, bitumen, Canada, Canadian oil sands, China, CNOOC, energy, foreign control of tar sands, Foreign Investment Review Act, Jeff Rubin, Nexen, oil production, oil sands, PetroChina, Petronas, syncrude, tar sands, unconventional oil
Recall that American consumers are (strongly) encouraged to think of Canadian production as domestic production.
CNOOC’s blockbuster deal for Nexen, if nothing else, is a stark indication of how far the goal posts have moved not only for Canada’s oil patch, but also for world oil demand. Only four or five years ago, the notion that a state-owned Chinese company could buy—lock, stock and barrel of bitumen—one of Canada’s premier oil names was politically unthinkable. Any such deal was sure to be turned down by Ottawa under its Foreign Investment Review Act (not to mention the hue and cry that would come from Alberta’s provincial government).
Today, that’s all changed. CNOOC’s $15-billion offer for Nexen follows a number of major foreign transactions in Canada’s energy sector. Among others, Malaysian energy giant Petronas is paying $5.5-billion to get at Progress Energy’s natural gas reserves in British Columbia. Earlier this year, PetroChina completed a two-pronged deal for Athabasca Oil Sands Corp. that tallied $2.5-billion. In 2010, Sinopec paid $4.65-billion for a 9 percent stake in Syncrude, which runs Alberta’s largest oilsands mine.
via CNOOC’s Nexen Bid Shows How Far Goal Posts Have Moved | Jeff Rubin.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: American oil production, crude oil, crude oil production, Econbrowser, energy, James Hamilton, oil production, peak oil, Texas oil production, Texas Railroad Commission, tight oil, transportation, westtexas
A historical perspective.
via Econbrowser and James Hamilton: http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2012/07/shale_oil_and_t.html
Industrialized Cyclist Notepad 