Olieprijs zakt verder; OPEC verlaagt productie fors

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Nov. 30 (Bloomberg) -- OPEC deferred a decision on reducing production this year by two weeks to gauge the impact of earlier cuts, as it seeks to push oil prices back up to $75 a barrel.

Crude has dropped 62 percent from July’s record of $147.27 a barrel as the global recession erodes sales. Ali al-Naimi, the oil minister of Saudi Arabia, OPEC’s largest exporter and its de facto leader, said yesterday that $75 a barrel represents a “fair price” needed to support investment in new fields.

OPEC, which accounts for more than 40 percent of the world’s supply, will next meet in Oran, Algeria, on Dec. 17. In a statement after yesterday’s meeting in Cairo, the group warned demand will be “much lower” than expected a month ago. The cost of crude has continued to slide even after the group agreed last month to lower production by 1.5 million barrels a day.

“The way demand data continues to come out, especially from the U.S., suggests that they will have to cut,” said Raja Kiwan, a Dubai-based analyst at consultant PFC Energy.
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Oil lies at the heart of bitter civil wars in several parts of the world, notably West Africa, while several governments have recently been scrambling to stake their claims over the newly discovered deposits of the Arctic. Above all, it is often regarded as America's strategic Achilles' heel. President-elect Barack Obama has promised to end U.S. "foreign oil dependency," claiming that it can be used as a "weapon" that allows overseas governments, particularly "unstable, undemocratic governments...to wield undue influence over America's national security." Last weekend, Mr. Obama announced his plan to create a major economic stimulus package, including spending on alternate energy.
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This identification wholly ignores the dependency of foreign oil producers on their consumers, above all on the world's largest single market -- the United States. Despite efforts to diversify their economies, all of the world's key exporters are highly dependent on oil's proceeds and have always lived in fear of the moment that has now become real -- when global demand slackens and prices fall. The recent, dramatic fall in price per barrel -- now standing at around $54, less than four months after peaking at $147 -- perfectly exemplifies the producers' predicament.

So even if such a move were possible in today's global market, no oil exporter is ever in a position to alienate its customers. Supposed threats of embargoes ring hollow because no producer can assume that its own economy will be damaged any less than that of any importing country. What's more, a supply disruption would always seriously damp global demand. Even in the best of times, a prolonged price spike could easily tip the world into economic recession, prompt consumers to shake off their gasoline dependency, or accelerate a scientific drive to find alternative fuels. Fearful of this "demand destruction" when crude prices soared so spectacularly in the summer, the Saudis pledged to pump their wells at full tilt. It seems that their worst fears were realized: Americans drove 9.6 billion fewer miles in July this year compared with last, according to the Department of Transportation.
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Sometimes the markets will prove at least as effective as any American sanctions in keeping a tight political rein on oil producers. For example, when Russian forces attacked South Ossetia and Georgia on Aug. 8, Russia's stock market -- of which energy stocks comprise 60% -- plunged by nearly 7%, and within a week capital outflow reached a massive $16 billion, suddenly squeezing domestic credit while the ruble collapsed in value. A month later, the country was facing its worst crisis since the default of August 1998. But the future of the oil sector is so dependent on attracting massive foreign investment, and the wider Russian economy so heavily dependent on petrodollars, that the Kremlin simply can't afford to unnecessarily unnerve investors.
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Russia's oil, in other words, acted as peacemaker. This seems paradoxical for it has sometimes been said that the Kremlin's attack on South Ossetia and Georgia was prompted by an ambition to seize control of local pipelines. But although this was an aggravating factor, it was not the primary cause because Russian leaders would have felt threatened -- reasonably or not -- by the presence of NATO in what they regard as their own backyard even if the region was not an energy hub. They were also reportedly eyeing Ukraine, which has no petroleum deposits of its own and poses no threat to the dominance of their giant energy company, Gazprom.
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In general, oil is such a vital commodity, for consumers, producers and intermediaries alike, that it represents a meeting point for all manner of different interests. Sometimes it offers an opportunity for competitors and rivals to resolve differences, as in March 1995, when Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani tried to break deadlock with Washington by offering a technically very demanding oil contract to Conoco. Today, the symbiotic energy requirements of Europe and Russia allows scope to improve mutual relations, not least if European governments act in unison to impose the rules of the European Union's energy charter on Moscow. Oil also gives consumers a chance to penalize, or tempt, international miscreants, just as U.S. sanctions are forcing the Tehran regime to reassess its cost-benefit analysis of building the bomb.

What cannot go unchallenged is a facile equation between oil on the one hand, and war, bloodshed and, in America's particular case, strategic vulnerability on the other. For oil, fortunately, can often be our guardian.

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CALGARY, Alta. -- Royal Dutch Shell PLC is delaying another Canadian oil sands project, saying Thursday it has withdrawn a regulatory application for its 100,000 barrel per day Carmon Creek thermal project as it looks to shave costs by revamping the project.

The delay is the latest blow to what had been an ambitious schedule of projects for Canada's oil sands. The oil sands region of northern Alberta contains the largest oil reserves outside the Middle East, but they are technically challenging and expensive to extract.

Shell, one of the biggest players in the oil sands, last month delayed an expansion of its oil sands mining operation when costs rose and oil prices fell.
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LONDON/NEW YORK (Reuters) - Global oil demand is expected to decline slightly in 2008 and 2009, the first drop in a generation, as the most severe economic crisis since the 1930s slashes consumption across the developed world.

Worldwide demand will decline by 20,000 barrels per day (bpd) in both 2008 and 2009 to 86.03 and 86.01 million bpd respectively, according to a Reuters poll of 11 analysts, banks and industry groups.

The slight fall is a large shift from a Reuters poll of experts in August, which forecast demand would increase by nearly 1 million bpd next year. Demand has not declined since the early 1980s, following the 1979 oil crisis and a severe recession in the United States.

"Global GDP growth is the main driver of oil demand, and with the economic slowdown we see global GDP rising by just 1.2 percent next year," Michael Lewis, head of commodities research at Deutsche Bank, said.

"Oil demand growth tends to lag world GDP growth by about 2 percent, so we think we'll see demand falling."
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"Given that emerging markets have been the engine of global oil demand growth in the past few years, a deteriorating economic outlook for non-OECD economies is clearly worrying," analysts at Merrill Lynch said in a report released on Wednesday.

"Although emerging market oil demand growth will still be positive overall, it will be substantially below the levels observed in the past few years."

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There is a third view as well - that oil prices will return to record levels fairly shortly, but oil company profits won't follow.

That's because oil firms will have to spend an increasing amount of money bringing new, more expensive supplies to market as older, cheap-to-pump fields dry up.

It's estimated that Saudi Arabia can still pump crude from it's massive Ghawar oil field for a little over $1 a barrel, but when that field may run dry is anyone's guess.

Some new fields, like those in the deep water Gulf of Mexico, are expected to cost over $90 a barrel to produce.

Some new projects, like off Russia's Saklin Island and in the Caspian Sea, are already way over budget and behind schedule.

"We may be back up to $150 a barrel, but costs are up too," said Douglas Ober, head of the Baltimore-based investment fund Petroleum & Resources. "We may concievably never see these profitably levels again."