With U.S. shale oil boom over, can world production climb?
World growth in oil supplies will have to come from someplace other than the United States. Will there be a new oil production savior?
World growth in oil supplies will have to come from someplace other than the United States. Will there be a new oil production savior?
It appears that OPEC has finally won its long war against shale oil as beaten up investors seek their fortunes elsewhere.
I believe that the Saudis and the Russians are trying again to destroy the shale oil industry in the United States with their dance of uncertainty. As of this writing, the world has been told that the Saudis’ on-again, off-again fight with the Russians is off-again resulting in a new deal to cut production.
Someone should send a note to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) that maybe it’s not all going to work out. If Hess is right about a peak in U.S. shale oil production soon, that peak will come about a decade earlier than the peak forecast by the EIA.
Will shale oil rise again from the dead as it did after the 2014-2016 price decline? That will happen only if two things occur: 1) The oil price rises significantly and 2) investors have a serious bout of amnesia.
The former CEO of America’s largest shale gas producer has just admitted publicly that the shale oil and gas industry has done nothing but destroy the capital of investors. Will his words make any difference?
A bidding war that didn’t happen over shale oil and gas may say something we all should know about those deposits.
As long as investors continued to plow money into U.S. shale oil companies, the industry seemed unstoppable. But with the flow of those funds all but stopped, has the U.S. shale oil industry entered a death spiral?
The rapid rise in U.S. oil production from so-called shale oil deposits has resulted in forecasts of oil abundance far into the future. The financial indicators and simple logic tell us that these forecasts are almost certainly wrong.
The move by OPEC last week to raise oil production to compensate for outages among the group’s members shows that U.S. shale oil (properly called “tight oil”) is still in its cross hairs–and that the economics of tight oil remain abysmal.
Riyadh-based Al Rajhi Capital dug into the financials of a long list of U.S. shale companies, and found that “despite rising prices most firms under our study are still in losses with no signs of improvement.”
The latest EIA drilling productivity report (11th April 2016) shows US shale oil production continuing to decline in Bakken, Eagle Ford and Niobrara while the Permian has flattened out.