Olieprijs op 55 dollar; OPEC verlaagt productie

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The oil and gas rig count, which is the number of rigs currently online, is widely regarded as an important indicator in

assessing the health of the oil industry. It can give investors and companies an idea of current demand, as well as provide

clues for the immediate future.
Baker Hughes: Weekly Rig Count

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Op dinsdag 26 augustus 2008 18:04 schreef kortsluiting87 het volgende:
TS is blackgold van een ander, niet nader te noemen, forum?

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TEHRAN - Iran’s oil minister said on Monday he expects OPEC to work on preventing the falling trend in crude prices and also to study oversupply in the market when it meets in September, oil ministry news website SHANA said.


Iran is traditionally a price hawk and has been at the forefront of rejecting calls for more output from consumers such as the United States, even when prices surged to a record $147 a barrel, a level from which they have now tumbled.

Iran has previously said the market was oversupplied by about 1 million barrels per day (bpd).

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SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Crude-oil futures climbed Tuesday on concerns that Hurricane Gustav will threaten oil production in the Gulf of Mexico, but prices closed off the day's high and fell in electronic trading after the U.S. Energy Department reported weaker year-over-year domestic demand for oil.

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Aug. 26 (Bloomberg) -- Evacuations of offshore oil and gas rigs and platforms in the Gulf of Mexico will begin tomorrow in preparation for Hurricane Gustav, which may become the strongest storm to hit the region in almost three years.

Transocean Inc., the world's largest offshore oil driller, has begun suspending operations in the Gulf. Royal Dutch Shell Plc is ``making logistical arrangements to evacuate staff who are not essential to production or drilling operations,'' spokesman Destin Singleton said in an e-mailed statement today.

``Shell generally leads off'' the evacuations, said Jim Shugart, executive vice president of ERA Helicopters LLC, which ferries workers to and from offshore facilities. ``They have by far the majority of workers out there and they figure it takes them four to four and a half days to evacuate everybody.''

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MEXICO CITY, Aug 26 (Reuters) - Crude output from Mexico's struggling Cantarell oil field fell for the 10th month in a row in July to 974,000 barrels per day, energy ministry data showed on Tuesday.

The fading jewel of Mexico's oil industry, Cantarell is now producing half what it was yielding at its 2004 peak, pulling down overall output in the world's No. 6 oil-producing nation and threatening Mexico's status as a top U.S. supplier.

The steady decline of around 15 percent annually in the field's output has pressured the divided Congress to tweak laws in the closed energy sector. The government, with backing from centrists, hopes to push a bill through Congress to allow more private participation in the state-run oil business.
[..]
Output at Cantarell, a shallow field in the southern Gulf of Mexico, fell in July from 1.018 million bpd in June.

Cantarell, for years the source of 60 percent of Mexico's crude, accounted for 35 percent of Mexico's overall July oil output, down from 36 percent in June.

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The airlines are grounding planes and laying off thousands of workers to save money in the face of higher fuel bills.

The Air Transport Association, a trade group for the big carriers, expects U.S. airlines to spend $61.2 billion this year on fuel, up from $41.2 billion last year.

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During a speech in Lansing, Mich., Obama said he’d like to release up to 10 percent of the 700 million barrels of oil kept in salt caverns in Texas and Louisiana. Obama also called for a revival of the windfall profits tax on oil companies.
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Among the short-term parts of his plan, Obama said: “We should sell 70 million barrels of oil from our Strategic Petroleum Reserve for less expensive crude, which in the past has lowered gas prices within two weeks
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The tax would target “big oil to give families a thousand-dollar rebate,” an announcer in the ad says. Obama has pushed for such a tax to fund $1,000 emergency rebate checks for consumers besieged by high energy costs.

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Fears are mounting that Russia may restrict oil deliveries to Western Europe over coming days, in response to the threat of EU sanctions and Nato naval actions in the Black Sea.

Any such move would be a dramatic escalation of the Georgia crisis and play havoc with the oil markets.

Reports have begun to circulate in Moscow that Russian oil companies are under orders from the Kremlin to prepare for a supply cut to Germany and Poland through the Druzhba (Friendship) pipeline. It is believed that executives from lead-producer LUKoil have been put on weekend alert.

"They have been told to be ready to cut off supplies as soon as Monday," claimed a high-level business source, speaking to The Daily Telegraph. Any move would be timed to coincide with an emergency EU summit in Brussels, where possible sanctions against Russia are on the agenda.

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Tropical Storm Gustav hasn't deviated from its "very ominous" track toward the U.S. coast of the Gulf of Mexico, and is likely to strengthen into a major hurricane before making landfall, a private forecaster said Thursday.

"This storm remains likely to explode into a major hurricane as it moves across the northwestern Caribbean and into the Gulf over the weekend," said Jim Rouiller, a senior energy meteorologist with weather forecasting firm Planalytics.
[..]

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The US oil and gas industry began to shut down production in the Gulf of Mexico yesterday after forecasters predicted that tropical storm Gustav would be a hurricane when it hit the region.

Royal Dutch Shell and ConocoPhillips led the majors in evacuating personnel and ceasing production.

The Gulf produces 20 per cent of US oil and gas supplies. Prices in New York topped $120 a barrel but fell after the International Energy Agency said strategic stocks would be released if disruptions were serious.

Jeffrey Rubin, chief economist at CIBC World Markets, said production had not returned to the 2005 levels before Katrina and Rita struck. The Gulf produces 1.3m barrels per day of oil, down from 1.6m then.
[..]

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BISMARCK, N.D. - Industry officials say they are mystified by fuel shortages at terminals in the Upper Midwest in recent days, but they expect enough supplies for the Labor Day holiday weekend.

Terminals have run out of fuel in West Fargo and Grand Forks in North Dakota; Alexandria, Minn.; and Sioux Falls, S.D.

Officials are trying to figure out why.
[..]

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DUBAI (Reuters) - China crossed the line first in the race for big oil contracts in post-Saddam Iraq and has gained a head start over Western oil majors in the competition for future energy deals.

China's biggest oil company, state-run CNPC, agreed a $3 billion service contract with Iraq on Wednesday.
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Starved of investment since the Gulf War of 1990-1991 and the subsequent U.S.-led invasion of 2003 that removed former President Saddam Hussein, Iraq holds some of the world's last large, cheap, untapped oil reservoirs.
[..]

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Op vrijdag 29 augustus 2008 10:42 schreef Q. het volgende:
Europa / de NAVO is gewoon heel dom bezig met die bedreigingen richting Rusland, we zijn enorm afhankelijk van ze (geworden)...

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``The emerging markets in general have a lot more risk than people are factoring in over the next 12 months. But I think Russia particularly could really shock some people on the downside'' because ``there's no transparency, no business ethics,'' and ``it is very resource-dependent.''
Bron: Michael Aronstein, chief investment strategist at Oscar Gruss & Son Inc.

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Op vrijdag 29 augustus 2008 11:13 schreef RM-rf het volgende:
met daadwerkelijk aanbod heeft de olieprijs als deze boven de 100 dollar komt, weinig meer te doen

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Op zaterdag 30 augustus 2008 22:49 schreef SeLang het volgende:

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Had ik dus toch wat oliecontractjes moeten kopen
Er was een tijd dat ik gewoon 4000 barrels kocht om te gokken op dit soort dingen.
Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, maar het blijft dus gewoon gokken.

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British oil group BP and US rivals ConocoPhillips and Shell on Thursday evacuated workers from their energy installations in the Gulf of Mexico, as Tropical Storm Gustav loomed.
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According to oil industry analyst Andy Lipow, based in Houston, Texas, Gustav could interrupt 75 percent of the Gulf's crude oil production, or more than one million barrels per day.

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Graphic below is damage models based on official NHC hurricane forecast track, key is below. Numbers are below the fold.

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Op maandag 1 september 2008 13:06 schreef SeLang het volgende:
Olieprijs daalt.
Nu $114.76

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Op maandag 1 september 2008 13:19 schreef SeLang het volgende:
Nu zelfs $113.73
Maar de handel is nu erg dun dus dat zegt niet zoveel.

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Oil prices touched a fresh record high of $68 a barrel last week, as Hurricane Katrina approached the region.

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Prices had reached as high as $70.85, an intraday high on Nymex, although still below the inflation-adjusted high of about $90 a barrel that was set in 1980.

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Shell, the Gulf's largest producer, said two of its drilling rigs were adrift. It had evacuated almost 1,000 employees and shut down production of 420,000 barrels a day.

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Western powers are selective in their censure of African regimes guilty of misrule, while ignoring those countries with oil, or who are allies in the US "war on terror". For example, Robert Mugabe has been rightly pilloried by the west for running Zimbabwe into the ground. Yet Mugabe's great ally, Angola's Eduardo dos Santos, whose ruling MPLA is going into a parliamentary election today, has an equally appalling record of autocratic rule. But Angola's fabulous oil wealth has silenced western criticisms of the regime's terrible human rights abuses.
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It is now clear that oil wealth protects African dictators from international pressure to democratise.
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Unless the west tackles these obvious blindspots, their criticisms of African misrule, although desperately needed, will ring hollow.

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A subject of lively debate among economists and business analysts today is the effect of rising oil prices on globalization. Rising oil prices translate into higher fuel costs, and that in turn drives up shipping costs. Ninety per cent of global demand for crude is based on the need for transportation fuels. In a world of triple-digit oil prices, could it cost less to manufacture products more expensively at home rather than ship cheaper products half way around the world? Could rising oil prices slow, stall, or even reverse the trend of globalization?
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Rising oil prices provide a powerful case for proximity. Mexico should become more attractive for outsourcing manufacturing of goods where transportation to market is a substantial part of the cost, such as heavy industrial equipment, furniture and clothing. By the same reasoning, the U.S. should become even more attractive to Canada as an export market.
[..]

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WASHINGTON - With public opinion shifting toward offshore drilling, Democrats are looking to defuse the volatile election issue by allowing oil companies for the first time to explore off the Atlantic and Gulf coasts from Virginia to Florida — but only if they foot the bill for new alternative energy programs.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who not long ago staunchly opposed lifting any of the offshore drilling bans, said Tuesday she now supports an energy package that would including drilling in federal waters off the southeastern coast. She is planning a vote that could come as early as Friday.

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Less than two weeks after evacuating thousands of offshore workers from production platforms and other facilities, Exxon Mobil Corp., Royal Dutch Shell and others were again removing workers from their posts Tuesday as Hurricane Ike approached.

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BAGHDAD (AFP) - Royal Dutch Shell will form a gas venture with energy-rich Iraq worth up to four billion dollars, the oil ministry said Tuesday of the first Western oil major to do a deal with the central government since the 2003 invasion.

The venture to capture unwanted gas burned off during oil production, for domestic consumption and export, is expected to be signed in Baghdad next month, ministry spokesman Assem Jihad told AFP.

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NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Oil prices fell Tuesday, as investors believed OPEC will keep production at current levels, and as Hurricane Ike lost strength over Cuba.

U.S. crude for October delivery settled down $3.08 to $103.26 a barrel, the lowest close since April 1, when oil ended the day at $100.98 a barrel.
[..]
Slumping global energy demand has caused the price of crude to fall sharply from the record-high $147.27 a barrel, set on July 11.
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As of Tuesday, 79.4% of crude oil production and 64.2% of natural gas production in the Gulf of Mexico remained shut from Gustav, according to the Department of Energy.

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Sometimes you just have to stand in awe and wonder before the all-knowing wisdom of The Market. Common sense would say: Hurricane Gustav (even considering the fact that it never achieved its advertised category 4 status before landfall) is likely to result in 40% of US Gulf of Mexico oil production being taken off-line for 30 days, with longer outages for some rigs, terminals, and refineries; therefore, given the fact that fuel supplies in the US are already tight, this is a good time to load up on oil futures.

But Noooooo. That’s not how the market works. Because the expectation of storm damage was higher, Monday’s trading was actually dominated by a sell-off.

This tells us just how important the market and price signals are in helping us prepare for the inevitable decline in world oil production. To wit: not very
[..]
Moral of the story: In the task of waking humanity up to the plight of resource depletion, the market is not very helpful, even if it occasionally does give useful warning signs. It’s a bit like the broken clock that tells perfect time twice a day.

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August global oil supply fell by 1.0 mb/d to 86.8 mb/d on North Sea maintenance, the BTC pipeline outage and lower OPEC supply. Non-OPEC output is revised by -180 kb/d for 2008 and by -85 kb/d for 2009, with hurricane outages impeding 2H08 supply. Non-OPEC growth including OPEC NGL is now 580 kb/d in 2008 and 1.56 mb/d in 2009.

OPEC crude supply in August fell by 195 kb/d to 32.5 mb/d on field and pipeline outages in Iraq, Angola, Libya and Nigeria, while effective spare capacity rose from 1.5 mb/d to 1.9 mb/d. The ‘call’ on OPEC is revised up to 32.2 mb/d for 3Q08 and 31.7 mb/d for 4Q08. This report went to press ahead of the OPEC 9 September meeting in Vienna.

Hurricane activity in the US Gulf of Mexico results in a 1.4 mb/d downward revision to US refinery crude throughput in September, to an average of 13.9 mb/d. Global September crude runs could decline by 1.3 mb/d from August. OECD crude runs are forecast to average 37.4 mb/d in September, their lowest level since October 2002.

OECD stocks rose by 47 mb in July to 2,646 mb. A large, unseasonal crude build from a revised June base and weaker demand leave end-July OECD cover at 54.5 days. Higher OECD end-June stocks now imply a 380 kb/d OECD stockbuild in 2Q08 versus last month’s estimate of flat second-quarter stocks, and a seasonal 2Q average build of 0.9 mb/d.

Forecast global oil demand has been lowered for both 2008 and 2009, following weaker deliveries in the OECD. World demand averages 86.8 mb/d in 2008 (+0.8% or +0.7 mb/d versus 2007 and 100 kb/d lower than previously estimated) and 87.6 mb/d in 2009 (+1.0% or +0.9 mb/d year-on-year and 140 kb/d lower than in our last report).

Benchmark crude futures continued their downward slide in August, approaching $100/bbl in early September, as fundamentals eased. Weaker OECD demand and higher stocks dominated sentiment, while markets have so far shrugged off Hurricanes Gustav and Ike, though the latter could yet defer post-Gustav supply recovery.

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Dankzij de hoge olieprijs en met nieuwe technieken, wordt ons Drentse Schoonebeek weer een rendabele oliewinplaats. Het veld sloot in 1996, maar wordt opnieuw in gebruik genomen. De verwachting is dat er de komende 25 jaar nog tot zo'n 120 miljoen vaten aan de bodem ontfutseld kunnen worden.
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Er zitten een miljard vaten in de grond waarvan er tot 1996 250 miljoen naar boven zijn gehaald. Met nieuwe efficiënte en schone technieken kan de nogal taaie en stroperige donkere smurrie er weer uitgepompt worden.
Bron

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Waar zit de olie in Nederland? De meeste olie zit in Zuidoost-Drenthe. Dit veld staat te boek als het Schoonebeek-olieveld. Plaatsen als Schoonebeek en Coevorden zijn bekend geworden door de oliewinning en in vroegere tijden stonden daar honderden jaknikkers. In 2007 heeft de NAM besloten opnieuw olie te gaan winnen in het Schoonebeek-veld. Naar verwachting zal in 2010 de nieuwe oliewinning een feit zijn.
Daarnaast wordt op dit moment nog olie gewonnen in de omgeving van Rotterdam en op de Noordzee.
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Offshore olie wordt elke 14 dagen naar de raffinaderij in Pernis gebracht. Olie uit de omgeving Rotterdam gaat via een pijpleiding naar Pernis. Olie uit Schoonebeek gaat via een pijpleiding naar de raffinaderij in Lingen (Duitsland).
Bron: NAM

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De grootste opslagtanks staan op de punt van de Maasvlakte en zijn van de Maasvlakte Olie Terminal (MOT). De MOT is een samenwerking tussen BP Raffinaderij, Esso Nederland, Koeweit Petroleum, Vopak Maasvlakte Terminal, Shell Nederland en Total Opslag. Alle opslagtanks van de MOT hebben een gezamenlijke capaciteit van 4.000.000 m³.
Bron: Wikipedia

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Waarvoor wordt olie gebruikt? Meer dan 86% van de totale aardolieconsumptie in Nederland wordt besteed aan brandstof voor industrie, transport en verwarming van gebouwen.
Bron: NAM

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Italy's national airline, Alitalia, may have to cancel some flights because of a lack of funds to buy fuel, a top official has warned.
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Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi blamed "political" motives for the failure.

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CARACAS, Sept 13 (Reuters) - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez sought to lower the tone of a diplomatic spat with the United States, saying he doesn't plan to take more steps against his country's biggest oil customer.
[..]

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By Ron Ewart
[..]
How is it that only politicians can take the laws of physics, economics and the principles of freedom and liberty and screw them up so badly?
[..]
The simple solution ......... We have more than enough oil on our own shores within our economic and environmentally sensitive grasp to meet our daily needs and be free of foreign blackmail. Drill for it now and put it in our cars as rapidly as we can. Build more refineries to process that oil. Cut gasoline grades down to about five, no more. Build nuclear and natural gas fired power plants. Convert coal to oil. Stop subsidies for ethanol and other uneconomic idiotic solutions and let them die a rapid death before these boon doggles drive our taxes up dramatically and drive our food prices out of reach of the average family, where we end up going hungry so a radical environmentalist or a government employee can feel good about him or herself for “saving the planet”. And stop this crazy idea of conserving energy. We don’t need to conserve, we have all the energy we need, if we will just go get it. We need to expand our opportunities and horizons, not limit them. Limits are for losers and whiners. Of course we need to continue working on economic energy solutions to replace crude oil. And in spite of what the so-called experts tell you, we are no where near “peak” oil. But new, economic technology will come along if we just let the power of our industry and capitalism operate efficiently and without impediments and constant second-guessing from an out-of-control, heavy-handed, stupid government that screws up everything it touches.

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RIO DE JANEIRO, Sept. 12 (Xinhua) -- Mines and Energy Minister Edison Lobao announced Friday Brazil plans to build 50 to 60 nuclear power plants in half a century, with each having capacity of 1,000 megawatts.

"The general idea is to build one plant per year," he said during a visit to the construction site of Brazil's third nuclear power plant, Angra 3.

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MOSCOW (AP) — Home to abundant oil reserves, Russia rarely worried about where the next barrel would come from — until now.

With analysts expecting production to fall this year for the first time in a decade, Russian companies are pushing to find new oil in remote regions such as the Arctic Shelf and East Siberia — but their efforts are hampered by crippling taxes that give the government much of the recent gains from high oil prices.
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The prospering energy industry in Russia has been crucial to the career of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who as president oversaw an eight-year, oil-fueled economic boom which improved the lives of many ordinary Russians and helped restore national self-confidence.

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A former government petroleum expert offered a concise explanation: The oil companies don’t really want it.

Energy companies “are not excessively interested in bringing in a new field so long as, by gradually increasing the price, they can stimulate production in the older regions,” Dr. David T. Day said.

And even though gasoline prices have gotten prohibitively high “for all but the rich” — according to the newspaper that carried Day’s remarks — the oil companies are only interested in maintaining their own profit margins, which they are doing just fine the way things are, Day said. He added, “It’s not surprising, then, that the oil companies hesitate to bring in a new and practicably inexhaustible supply of crude petroleum from oil shales.”

Oh, by the way, I should mention here that Dr. Day made these remarks nearly 90 years ago.
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As I have written in countless editorials, the primary obstacle blocking commercial oil shale development is technological, not political maneuvering or corporate conspiring. The oil companies have not yet demonstrated they can successfully recover fuel from oil shale on a large scale in a way that is economically feasible. That was true in 1920 and it’s true today.

I don’t know whether those technological impediments will ever be overcome. Certainly, a few companies are working hard, attempting to do just that. Shell, in particular, has demonstrated it can successfully recover the oil from shale — at what the company says is a net energy gain — on a small scale. But transferring its very complicated technology into the scale necessary for commercial production remains uncertain.

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VIENNA, Sept 11 (Reuters) - Nuclear power production could as much as double by 2030 as countries seek relief from rising fossil fuel costs and a remedy against global warming, the International Atomic Energy Agency said on Thursday.

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Op maandag 15 september 2008 12:24 schreef RemcoDelft het volgende:

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Wij krijgen geen benzine van die kant, dat ze daar tekorten hebben zegt al dat wij er geen last van hoeven te hebben.

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Op maandag 15 september 2008 12:49 schreef Scorpie het volgende:

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3 jaar geleden tankte je aan de pomp voor 1.19 een liter benzine, met een olieprijs van 75 dollar.
Nu betaal je 1.62 aan de pomp, met een olieprijs van 98 dollar....

De olieprijs is met een kwart gestegen, de benzineprijs met 40%.

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2005-Sep 09/02 60.75 09/09 59.18 09/16 56.93 09/23 58.20
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/hist/wtotworldw.htm

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John Hofmeister, the former president of Shell Oil Co. and one of the most influential voices in the oil industry, called for short-term gasoline rationing by introducing odd-even purchases based on an automobile's license plate and by limiting the amount of gasoline drivers can purchase.

The United States will be in "a world of hurt" for the next four to six weeks as the oil industry recovers from the damage from Hurricanes Gustav and Ike, said Mr. Hofmeister, who recently founded a new company, Citizens for Affordable Energy. The areas where rationing will be needed include the Southeast and extend northward toward Denver, the upper Midwest and Washington, D.C., Mr. Hofmeister said in a newsmaker interview Monday morning with editors and reporters of The Washington Times.
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"America is suffering a lot more than is being reported," said Mr. Hofmeister, who is also chairman of the National Urban League. The economic slowdown may not be affecting the well-to-do, but it is "really nailing middle- and low-income people."

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According to today's DOE report, 3.6 million barrels of refinery capacity is shut in, and 2.5 million barrels is operating with reduced runs. In my refinery article, I used an estimate of one-third of production from reduced runs being off line. With this approach, 4.4 million barrels of refinery production is off-line, which is about 22% of oil products use. The corresponding calculation from yesterday's report would indicate that 4.5 million barrels were offline then, so we are making slight progress. It would be difficult to get along without 22% of oil products for long, however.
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The report indicates that 1.3 million barrels of crude oil production is off-line. The US produced a total of about 5.1 million barrels of crude oil a day, including all of the United States. The amount currently off-line amounts to about 25% of US production.

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ARGONNE, Illinois (Reuters) - A future of all-electric cars coasting along streets and highways may be illusory, given that their range may be cut in half by aggressive drivers speeding along with the air conditioning blasting, U.S. scientists said on Monday.

That may not be a bad thing, as it will persuade consumers to choose the best blend of electric- and gas-powered hybrid vehicle to suit the type of driving they do.

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LONDON (Reuters) - The renewable energy sector will see a 21 billion euro ($29.43 billion) shortfall in debt finance by 2020, following the credit crisis and a brake on lending, a senior banker said on Monday.

Investors at a renewable energy finance conference in London tried to digest the implications of a banking hiatus following Lehman Brothers' filing for bankruptcy and Bank of America's acquisition of Merrill Lynch.
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"The credit crunch will have a major impact on the renewable energy sector," Cuppen said. "I think we haven't had the worst yet."
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However, energy infrastructure projects are hurting because the banks, faced with the threat of more loan defaults, are limiting lending.

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Charles Hall, the father of the energy return on investment (EROI) concept, once told me that our current society would probably not be able to function if the EROI for the entire society slipped below five.

What does that mean?

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On average, industry analysts surveyed by Platts expect the Wednesday report to show that crude supplies fell by 3.7 million barrels for the week ended Sept. 12, distillates fell by 1.7 million and motor gasoline inventories fell by 3.6 million barrels.
"A combination of lower imports as the Louisiana Offshore Oil Platform and the Houston Ship Channel closed ahead of the arrival of Hurricane Ike, as well as oil production in the Gulf of Mexico that remained shut-in after Hurricane Gustav, will result in another week of sharp stock declines," said Linda Rafield, Platts senior oil analyst, in a note to clients.

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The reason that GA, SC, NC, TN are seeing more shortages than other parts of the country is that they are total dependant on the pipelines to supply them. They have no other source of supply than the Gulf refineries. This makes those area particularly susceptible to Gulf outages.

According to the EIA the US has about 20 days of finished product inventory. About one-half of that inventory is stuck in a pipe somewhere between the source (refinery, import point) and the storage tanks at the end of the pipelines. The US has at most about 10 days of useable stock at any point in time.

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The Government’s assessment is that the world’s oil resources are sufficient to prevent global total oil production peaking in the foreseeable future. This is consistent with the assessment made by the International Energy Agency (IEA) in its recent 2007 World Energy Outlook (WEO), which concludes that proven reserves are already larger than the cumulative production needed to meet rising demand until at least 2030.

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Remember when $200-per-barrel oil looked inevitable? Or, at the very least, a $100-per-barrel plateau looked certain? Plenty of oil analysts thought that was just over the horizon (yes, I was also guilty of this). But now crude futures are hovering down around $90, despite the succession of brutal hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico—mainly due to fears that the crisis on Wall Street will knock more wind out of the U.S. economy and further dampen demand. So does that mean all the frantic concern about "peak oil" and all the apocalyptic blather about the end of mass air travel and so on and so forth was all totally baseless and wrong?

Well, I'm not sure about that. Production figures and forecasts still suggest that oil production really may peak in the next few years. But it's worth trying to clarify what peak oil would actually entail. Here's Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute: "Sometime around 2010 (give or take two or three years), growing decline rates in oil production from existing oilfields will overwhelm new production streams coming online. The price of oil will rise dramatically. However, when it does it will cripple the trucking industry, the airline industry, tourism, agriculture—essentially, the whole economy. A serious recession will ensue, which will reduce demand for oil (among other things). Oil’s price will temporarily drop in response. Then, as declines in oil production worsen, the price will resume its upward march—but again in a sawtooth or whipsaw fashion."

In other words, if global production is in fact peaking, we may be in not so much for an inexorable march upward in the price of oil and a permanent $150-per-barrel plateau, but rather lots and lots of volatility—which would prove just as damaging in the long run. (What good is cheap oil if we have to suffer through a recession to get it?) Now, if Heinberg's right, then it's a good time to start reducing our vulnerability to oil shocks, which in the long term means getting off the black gooey stuff for good. In the short term, that means—among other things—upping the energy intensity of the economy (especially in the transport sector), which would minimize the damage inflicted by rapid price fluctuations. The fact that prices have rocketed back down rather quickly is no reason to get complacent. On the other hand, if we're in a world of wildly volatile—rather than permanently high—oil prices, that also makes it much harder for alternative energy sources to get a foothold in the market without smarter policies from on high.

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Op woensdag 17 september 2008 19:51 schreef RemcoDelft het volgende:

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Speculaties? Voorraad nu verkopen en aanvullen als de olie nog goedkoper is?

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Op vrijdag 19 september 2008 20:41 schreef ItaloDancer het volgende:

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Dat klopt niet hoor

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``Probably the max is an 8.5 million draw in gasoline because demand is down, and it could be as low as 6.5 million'' barrels, John Duff, survey manager for the Energy Department's weekly petroleum status report, said in an interview. The report will show ``the real impact of the hurricane on the refining sector,'' he said. Supplies will fall ``substantially.''

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So far, since refineries first shut down before Hurricane Gustav, over 36 million barrels of products have not been produced, including nearly 17 million barrels of gasoline and nearly 12 million barrels of distillate fuel. This does not include reduced production from refineries that have reduced runs at various times during Hurricanes Gustav or Ike. As of September 19, 7 refineries were running at a reduced rate. As of September 19, the Colonial and Plantation product pipelines continue to operate at reduced rates. Both of these are major product pipelines going from the Gulf Coast to the East Coast.

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There are a lot of issues that I might have mentioned, but didn't. One of the more important is the possibility that the pipeline system may be near minimum operating level, and that some sections will no longer function if the level gets too low. The areas that would seem to be most at risk are the ones at the ends or lines, or on small spur pipelines. If this should happen, residents in the areas affected areas might find themselves out of all types of refined products (including diesel and jet fuel), unless they had extra supply stored in local supply tanks. Additional supply could theoretically be trucked in, but we have a limited number of trucks for transporting fuel.

Colonial pipeline is one of the pipelines that has had difficulty with adequate supply. The supply begins in Texas/Louisiana. The areas I would expect to be most at risk are on the spur pipelines and farthest north.

quote:

The good news is that it is plentiful. Around the world, there are thought to be roughly 3 trillion barrels of oil locked in oil shale deposits. And more than half of that is in the United States. Most of the U.S. oil shale is located in an area known as the Green River Formation, which stretches across Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. It is possible that there is more oil in these U.S. deposits of oil shale than there is oil left in "normal" crude oil deposits worldwide. In other words, oil shale could provide the United States with oil for many decades.

The bad news is that the oil in oil shale is not so easy to extract. With a normal oil well, you are tapping into an underground lake of oil. An oil company drills down to the lake and then pumps the liquid oil to the surface. This liquid crude oil can flow through pipelines directly to a refinery.

With oil shale, you start with something that looks like a rock. You dig this rock out of the ground, usually using the same kind of techniques used to mine coal. This rock obviously contains energy, because the rock burns if you light it. In some countries, oil shale rock is a fuel for power plants.

But, if you want to convert oil shale into something like gasoline or diesel fuel, you need a few more steps. The most common technique is to heat the rock to a high temperature to turn all of the oil contained in the rock into a gas. The heating is done in a container that does not contain any oxygen, so the oil won't burn. Once you cool the gas back down, much of it liquefies. This liquid is processed and refined to form different liquid fuels.

An obvious problem here is the heat. You have to do something to heat up the rock. One solution is to burn some of the oil coming out of the rock. This is easy and obvious, but it lowers the yield and creates more pollution. Another more ambitious idea uses heat from a nuclear power plant to release the oil.

In any case, after all of this processing, you end up with something like 10 to 60 gallons of shale oil from each ton of rock that you mine from the ground. The mining and processing means that the oil coming from oil shale can be relatively expensive compared to crude oil that is pumped from the ground. When oil costs $10 a barrel, oil shale does not make economic sense. But when oil is at $100 a barrel or more, oil shale has a lot of economic justification.

Even with economic viability, however, oil shale has another problem: It has a relatively large effect on the environment. Mining is not great for the environment to begin with. Then the process of heating the rock and extracting the oil creates pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. In addition, processing the oil shale can consume a lot of water. And then there is all the shale left over once the oil is extracted. Millions and millions of tons of it, and it all has to go somewhere. Often it goes right back where it came from, where there are more environmental costs involved. New techniques, like heating and extracting the oil while the shale is still in the ground, lower some of these environmental costs.

quote:

Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter, will need crude prices to remain above $49 a barrel to avoid a fiscal deficit, a senior International Monetary Fund official has said.

“If it goes below that level we would start seeing a fiscal account deficit,” Mohsin Khan, director of Middle East and central Asia at the IMF, told Dow Jones Newswires.

Oil prices have fallen drastically in the past two month, shedding over $50 in value since they hit $147 a barrel in July, raising concerns over the continued strength of Persian Gulf Arab economies.

Saudi Arabia, the Middle East largest economy, depends on oil and gas sales for 90% of its export income. “Saudi Arabia’s break-even price is the highest among the Gulf Co-operation Council Countries because they are spending on a lot of projects right now, and oil money is used to fund these projects,” he said. Further declines in oil prices could tip the region’s economies over the edge as they continue to spend heavily on infrastructure projects.

According to Middle East Economic Digest, Gulf states are spending about $2.3tn on projects.

quote:

Op maandag 22 september 2008 21:48 schreef SeLang het volgende:

[..]

Het lijkt op een soort van shortsqueeze.
Vandaag was de laatste dag dat het October contract verhandeld kon worden. Traders die niet fysiek de olie willen leveren or geleverd willen krijgen MOETEN hun contract op z'n laatst vandaag sluiten. Het lijkt erop dat er traders short zaten en nu tegen elke prijs contracten terug moesten kopen omdat ze anders de plicht hebben om olie te leveren die ze niet hebben.

quote:

If Matt Simmons is right, the recent drop in crude prices is an illusion - and oil could be headed for the stratosphere. He's just hoping we can prevent civilization from imploding.

(Fortune Magazine) -- Matt Simmons is as perplexed as anyone that it has fallen to him to take on OPEC, Exxon, the Saudis, and all the other misguided defenders of conventional wisdom in the oil patch. Why should one investment banker with a penchant for research be required to point out what he regards as the obvious - that from here on out, oil supplies can't meet demand, and if we don't act soon to solve this crisis, World War III could be looming?

Why should a man who scorns most environmentalists have to argue that locally grown produce and wind power are the way of the future? Why should a lifelong Republican need to be the one to point out that his party's new mantra - "Drill, baby, drill!" - won't really fix anything and that his party's presidential candidate is clueless about energy? That the spike in oil prices earlier this year wasn't a temporary market anomaly and the recent retreat in prices is just a misleading calm before a calamitous storm? That we're headed toward $500-a-barrel oil?


[..]
And so he did. But writing the book didn't exhaust his passion. Today he is more convinced than ever that we've reached peak oil. If he's right, current world oil production- 86 million barrels a day- is about as high as we're going to go.
[..]
No one disputes that oil production will top out some day. It is, after all, a finite resource. The argument is about how far off the peak is. As Simmons and others point out, many of the world's largest oilfields - Prudhoe Bay, the North Sea - have already gone into decline. The most optimistic estimate for the average depletion rate of the world's currently producing oilfields is between 4% and 5% annually, or about four million barrels per day at our current rate of production. That means that each year we must find enough new oil to first replace those four million barrels of lost daily production before we even add enough to meet new demand. This is all the more worrisome because world oil discovery of new reserves has been slowing since the mid-20th century.
[..]
Earlier this year Abdallah Jum'ah, CEO of Saudi Aramco, the kingdom's national oil company, called peak oil "a myth." The multinational oil giants are only slightly less optimistic. While they acknowledge that crude is getting harder to find and produce and that so-called unconventional oil (like natural-gas liquids) will be increasingly important, they don't think a peak is imminent either. Exxon Mobil (XOM, Fortune 500) has run ads that dismiss peak oil as a far-off problem. This summer Tony Hayward, BP's (BP) chief executive, bet a peakist that oil production in 2018 will be higher than it is today. "It's unbelievable," says Simmons. "These guys don't even understand their own business."

One difficulty in assessing the situation is the lack of transparent information about oil production and reserves, particularly in OPEC countries. Back in the 1980s, after OPEC decided to base its production quotas on reserve figures, several of the cartel's producers abruptly raised their claims of "proven reserves" by 40% or more. Saudi Arabia, for instance, raised its proven-reserve figure from 170 billion barrels to about 260 billion in 1988. Amazingly, that figure has stayed more or less constant since then - even as billions of barrels have been pumped out of the ground. "We need to send in the audit troops," says Simmons regularly in his speeches. "The major oilfields of the world need to be invaded by third-party inspectors so that we can figure out how bad things are and deal with it."
[..]
John McCain is energy illiterate," Simmons is saying. "He's just witless about this stuff. As a lifelong Republican, I'm supporting Obama." A dozen oil and gas men sitting around a conference table in Lafayette, La., chuckle nervously as he continues. "McCain says, 'Oh, we're going to wean ourselves off foreign oil in four years and build 45 nuclear plants by 2030.' He doesn't have a clue."
[..]
McCain's midsummer move to begin campaigning on a platform of more offshore drilling has only hardened Simmons's position. "What a hypocrite," says Simmons, who supported McCain's rival Mitt Romney in the primary - no surprise given Simmons's history with the Romney family. "Here's a man who for at least the past 15 years has strenuously, I mean strenuously, opposed offshore drilling. And now it's 'drill, drill, drill.' And he doesn't have any idea that we don't have any drilling rigs. Or that we don't have any idea of exactly where to drill." (As for McCain's running mate, Sarah Palin, Simmons says: "She's a very colorful person, but I don't think there's a scrap of evidence that she knows anything about energy.")
[..]
Simmons believes that a radical change in the way we live is inevitable. "We should basically be going back to creating a village economy, so that we really reduce the energy intensity of how we live," he says. "We need bigtime conservation, not feel-good conservation. Make things where they're used. You'll end long-distance commuting, and we have the tools to do that now with webcams. Grow food locally. Grow food in your backyard. If they're not commuting, people will have time to do that."
[..]
On the way out, I asked Simmons if seeing the lab made his virtual institute feel more real. "Oh, yeah, very impressive," he said. "But we need to compress the time frame - 2020 is way too far out. That plan is fine assuming that we go along like we are now, and everything is okay in the world. But it's not going to be okay. We're going to need this stuff much sooner."

quote:

Op dinsdag 23 september 2008 11:04 schreef RM-rf het volgende:
omdat die 'matt simons' toevallig zegt wat jij de hele tijd hard loopt te denken?


nee sorry, maar als de prijsontwikkeling nu juist iets bewijst is dat de marktprijsontwikkeling verdomd weinig nog met daadwerkelijk aanbod en vraag te maken heeft maar dat allerhande effecten van de markt, zoals het 'aflopen van short-contracten' er een veel grotere invloed op hebben...

quote:

Uiteindelijk is het wel een ontzettend groot nadeel voor de aantrekkelijkheid van olie deze ongezonde prijsfluctuaties, maar dat is dan weer zelf een voordeel voor eventuele investeringen in aanpassingen van de energie-voorziening, waardoor de economie steeds onafhankelijker van olie wordt ...
dat is overigens al een aspect dat allang aan de gang is.... de afhankelijkheid van olie voor energie is stukken minder dan in de 70'er jaren: er bestaan veel meer energie-alternatieven die zeer kosten-efficient zijn en marktgedrag op de oliemarkt als die nu plaats vind versterkt enkel het voordeel daarvan....

quote:

Uitspraken als
[..]

zijn wat mij beteft een teken van iemand met een zeer zwak verstand ...we leven hier niet in en communistische maatschappij waarbij de 'manier waarop mensen leven' kennelijk van bovenaf bepaald kan worden en ik denk niet dat dat een idee is waarnaar we moeten streven

quote:

Op dinsdag 23 september 2008 12:07 schreef SeLang het volgende:
Met olie >$100 zijn opeens een hoop onrendabele velden rendabel geworden. Als de olieprijs verder stijgt naar bijv $200 dan wordt dat nog veel meer. Daardoor kan 'peak oil' wel eens wat verder weg liggen dan velen denken. Oliemaatschappijen rekenen nu nog steeds met $60 olie ofzo. Maar als men ervan overtuigd is dat de hoge olieprijs blijvend is dan zullen er meer investeringen komen in velden die voorheen niet rendabel waren. Zal overigens wel even duren voordat dat online komt.

quote:

Op dinsdag 23 september 2008 12:35 schreef RM-rf het volgende:

[..]

en dat noem je snel?

man, die column geschreven op een prijsontwikkeling die in een halve dag plaatsvind en dat wil je direkt gaan verbinden met een aanbod-effect dat we 'zullen merken' in 5 jaar ?

quote:

Alles leuk en aardig, maar het 'pieken' van de olieproductie is ook niet iets dat je op het moment van en piek direkt zult merken en pas achteraf aantoonbaar kan zijn als je daadwerkelijk macro-effecten kunt traceren op bv grafieken van productie-ontwikkeling..

quote:

verder, het zou een absoluut unicum zijn als er daadwerkelijk een piek zou ontstaan door een echte 'onmogelijkheid' te winnen...
de meeste pieken in bv productie van grondstoffen ontstaan vooral doordat alternatieven relatief gunstiger worden en veelal ook beter winbaar of andere voordelen blijken te hebben, hierdoor daalt de afhankelijkheid van een bepaalde grondstof
er is een algemeen bekend effect bij natuurlijke grondstoffen dat de prijs hiervan na een eventuele piek juist verder daalt... dat is ook zo bij bv kolen dat de voorganger was van olie als 'energie-grondstof', en allle grondstoffen die in de voorgaande geschiedenis de 'hoofddrager' waren van de economische vooruitgang.

quote:

Er bestaat overigens helemaal niet waarnaar we moeten 'streven' behalve dat de mens bepaalde financiele en economische mogelijkheden heeft en het een evolutionair proces is dat die volkeren het verste komen (of domweg hun voortbestaan kunnen verzekeren) die effectief het best gebruik maken van hun toegang tot bepaalde grondstoffen of productie-markten

quote:

“Considering the many productive uses of petroleum, burning it for fuel is like burning a Picasso for heat.”
—Big Oil Executive

quote:

Op dinsdag 23 september 2008 13:33 schreef RM-rf het volgende:
het is echter verder gewoon en gegeven dat zal ontstaan door verdere innovatie van bestaande technieken en natuurlijk... iedere verdere technologische innovatie bouwt nu net weer nieuwe afhankelijkheden in... maar dat is eigen aan de mensheid en begonnen vanaf het moment dat er 'culturen' ontstonden die op basis van gecultiveerde' productietechnieken in hun voedselvoorziening gingen voorzien (rond 10.000 v chr. , wat samengaat met het ontstaan van georganiseerde religie-vormen, de uitvinding van de landbouw en bv ook die van het schrift en het ontstaan van vaste nederzettingen e.d.)

quote:

vast leuk om uit een soort van 'principe' zulke ideeen aan te halen, maar veel realsime zit er niet achter en dan heb ik meer vertrouwen in juist die marktwerking van een bedrijfsopzet die domweg de verantwoordelijkheid tegenover andeelhouders hebben om gedane investeringen ook weer terug te winnen.... (en nee, ik ben geen groot gelover in marktwerking tegen alles in, of een vrijemarkt-utopist)

quote:

Op dinsdag 23 september 2008 14:00 schreef RM-rf het volgende:
als je dacht dat je auto kon rijden zonder dat technologische inovatie je daartoe de mogelijkheid in de eerste plaats geboden heeft, mis je ergens wat ....

quote:

jouw hele leven, en dat van 99,9% van alle mensen op deze planeet (ja zelfs in de meest achteraf liggende gebieden muv. die volkeren die kennelijk nooit gecultiveerde technieken ontwikkeld hebben als landbouw) is gebaseerd op die voortdurende technologische innovatie..

quote:

en wil de mens zijn voortbestaan verzekeren is hij ook per definitie afhankelijk van een voortdurend verdergaande ontwikkeling... dat te willen ontkennen is domweg essentuiele eigenschap van de 'cultuur'-basis van het menselijk bestaan niet willen zien (ik gebruid aar de term 'cultuur' in de vorm van het tegengestelde van 'natuur': "In brede zin wordt het gebruikt voor 'alles wat door de samenleving wordt voortgebracht'. 'Cultuur' wordt dan tegenover 'natuur' gesteld.")

quote:

Op dinsdag 23 september 2008 14:49 schreef Basp1 het volgende:

[..]

Nou zoveel zonnecellen hebben we ook weer niet nodig, ongeveer een oppervlakte ter grootte van frankrijk om met de huidge zonnecellen de hele wereld van net zoveel energie als we nu gebruiken te voorzien.

quote:

A petroleum executive suggested Thursday that Gov. Sonny Perdue should cancel Saturday's football game between Georgia and Alabama.
[..]
"That gas needs to be used for people to go to work, and for people to take care of their families," Pitfield told WGAU in Athens.

The governor's office quickly rejected the idea.

"The governor is not going to consider a ridiculous idea like this,” Perdue spokesman Bert Brantley said late Thursday. “We’re also not going to stop living our lives. People understand there are common-sense things they can do.”

UGA Police Chief Jimmy Williamson said fans who can't make a round trip on one tank should stay home.

quote:

Gas shortages are afflicting drivers across the Southeast. Some of the problems were caused by Hurricane Ike affecting oil production and refining along the Gulf Coast, but empty gas pumps also are being blamed on the consumers themselves.
[..]
Asheville, North Carolina
City officials in Asheville have closed the civic center, parks and offices because of the gas shortage, CNN affiliate WHNS-TV reports.
[..]
Athens, Georgia
A petroleum executive suggested that the football game between the University of Georgia and University of Alabama should be canceled this weekend because fans could drain all the gas in the Athens area, WSB-TV in Atlanta reported.
[..]
Atlanta, Georgia
Ray Sheffied's gas station had been open 24 hours a day, seven days a week for 13 years. But the streak ended when a lack of supply forced him to close early, WGCL-TV in Atlanta said.
[..]
Charlotte, North Carolina
Drivers camped out overnight in the hope that a shipment of gas would arrive at a station in Charlotte, WSOC-TV found.
[..]
Raleigh, North Carolina
North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley promised that more gas was on the way from other states, but WXII-TV found many stations dry or with only one or two grades of fuel left.

quote:

NEW YORK (Fortune) -- While Congress and Bush administration officials have been working to complete a bailout plan and stem the financial contagion on Wall Street, a different kind of economic crisis emerged across the South this week: A severe, hurricane-related gasoline shortage has curtailed trucking from Atlanta to Asheville, N.C., and created a wave of panic buying among motorists.

The return of gas lines has largely flown under the radar of politicians who are usually keenly attuned, because their constituents are, to what's going on at the pump. But more of the Capitol gang should be paying attention to this.

That's because nationwide our gasoline inventory is shockingly low. Liquidity must be restored soon to this market, or we could be facing a crippling run on the gasoline bank. And if you think Americans are outraged about Wall Street, wait until their Main Street grocery store doesn't get the bread and milk delivery for a week or two.

Back to the '70s

The scenes over the past several days in places like Nashville, Tenn., Anniston, Ala., and western North Carolina looked like file footage from 1979 - with bags over empty gas pumps and quarter-mile long lines of cars waiting to fill up at stations that hadn't run out. AAA reported that drivers were so desperate that they were following tankers to gas stations to ensure a fill-up.
[..]
A bigger problem
But while the current shortages can be traced directly to the two hurricanes, the severity of the problem points out a bigger issue: The U.S. has been operating for a while with razor-thin spare gasoline capacity.
[..]
As he (Matt Simmons) told me the other day: "If we end up having gasoline shortages, the odds are about 90% that Americans will do what we always do: We'll top up our tanks. And in topping up our tanks, within three or four days we'll drain the pool dry and then within seven days we'll run out of food."

quote:

GASTONIA, N.C. -- Tuesday night, paramedics hoping to fuel their ambulances in Gaston County ran into a minor emergency of their own.

Gas pumps were open, but there was no gas to get out of them, diesel or otherwise.
The assistant director of emergency services, Jeff Waldrep, said finding gas in Gaston County is “kind of like a shell game.” It’s anyone’s guess where there might be fuel.

Places that used to always have gas now have only give apologies for being empty.

Waldrep said the problem has not interrupted emergency services in part because workers have started keeping a log of where they can find gas.

quote:

Op zaterdag 27 september 2008 10:17 schreef El_Matador het volgende:
De olie is nog lang niet op, maar het verbruik moet omlaag.

quote:

ORLANDO — Barack Obama and John McCain are promising voters a Tomorrowland of electric cars and high-speed trains and solar panels, a vision of American life without a drop of imported oil.

But their plans to get there look more like Fantasyland.

A host of energy policy experts agree that true "energy independence"—a key catch phrase of this presidential campaign—would be far more expensive and disruptive than either candidate is telling you.

Our oil addiction hamstrings America's foreign policy and military, contributes to global warming and has robbed the nation of trillions of dollars. One of the country's leading energy modelers estimates that foreign-oil dependence cost our economy $750 billion this year, a little more than the daunting price tag of the proposed Wall Street bailout.
[..]
Experts suggest the candidates are wildly understating the cost and time that true independence would require. The transition to a national life without imported oil appears so expensive that none of more than a dozen scientists and scholars interviewed by the Tribune could calculate a price tag. Only one even ventured a ballpark guess: $1 trillion to $2 trillion.
[..]
Presidents and candidates have promised energy independence since the oil shocks of the early 1970s. To see why they all failed, and why the goal is so daunting for this year's contenders, it helps to examine what it would take for one fast-growing American city to achieve "independence" within a generation.
[..]
In one scenario, Americans abandon sprawl and freeways for high-density, public-transit-powered urban living. In the second, we keep our exurban commutes but make them in cars that use little or no gasoline—super-efficient hybrids, perhaps fueled by electricity or biofuel or hydrogen. Many experts predict a mix of the two.
[..]
McCain's energy speeches emphasize domestic oil drilling, which would replace a small fraction of imports, and building a fleet of nuclear power plants—which would only reduce foreign dependence significantly if America converted to electric cars.
[..]
"To truly woo us away from oil, you're looking at somewhere between 1 and 2 trillion dollars," says Charles Ebinger, a longtime energy consultant in developing nations who now directs the Energy Security Initiative at the Brookings Institute. Compared to what dependence costs the economy, he adds, the nation can afford it.
[..]
"History teaches that if we relent, believing that the problem has been solved, our oil dependence problem is likely to return."

quote:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The welcome sign is going out to oil and gas companies off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.

A quarter-century ban on offshore exploration expires in this coming week, but don't expect to see a chain of drilling platforms from the beaches anytime soon.

It will take a couple of years, at least, before any oil or natural gas leases are issued, years more before any oil is found and perhaps a decade before any of it begins to flow to refineries.
[..]
While the freeze ends this Wednesday, the start of the new budget year, oil and gas companies are not revving up their seismic monitoring boats — much less their drilling rigs.

"We do think ... the reserves are significant, so we're very interested in having those areas open for exploration," said Marvin Odum, president of Shell Oil Co., a dominant player in deep-water oil exploration in the Gulf of Mexico.

The available data "shows good resources on both coasts," Odum said in a recent meeting with reporters, adding that other companies as well as his own would be interested in pursing those areas. But he also said he is "keeping a close eye" on what the government does next.

quote:

ELK POINT, S.D. — The United States hasn’t built an oil refinery on a new site in more than 30 years, but a pair of projects eyeing out-of-the way corners of South Dakota and Arizona are slowly working their way up to the big leagues.
[..]
“It’s been more cost-effective to expand than to build new, and it makes sense because you have a lot of the existing infrastructure in place,” said Cindy Schild, refining issues manager for the American Petroleum Institute.

quote:

Op zondag 28 september 2008 17:49 schreef El_Matador het volgende:
Rijswijk produceert volgens mij al jaren niet meer. En op de Noordzee is het toch voornamelijk gas.

quote:

Op zondag 28 september 2008 19:33 schreef El_Matador het volgende:

[..]

Er wordt genoeg gezocht. Je kan niet produceren wat er niet is.

quote:

Unleaded 26-Sep
Beginning Inv 178.7
Imports 9.1 1.3 (week, p/dag)
Production 60.9 8.7 (week, p/dag)
Available 248.7
Ending Inv 179.6
Balance 69.1
Balance/day 9.87
Prod Supplied 8.9
Actual Change 0.9

Distillates 26-Sep
Beginning Inv 125.4
Imports 1.365 0.195 (week, p/dag)
Production 25.9 3.7 (week, p/dag)
Available 152.665
Ending Inv 123.1
Balance 29.565
Balance/day 4.22
Prod Supplied 3.8
Actual Change -2.3

Crude Oil 26-Sep
Beginning Inv 290.2
Production 27.727 3.961 (week, p/dag)
Imports 63 9 (week, p/dag)
Total Available 380.927
Provided to Ref 87.5 12.5 (week, p/dag)
Ending Inventory 294.5
Actual Change 4.3

quote:

Vraag 45 - Zijn de gegevens uit tabel 2.1 gebaseerd op de gegevens van de betreffende olieproducerende landen zelf? Zo ja, is het kabinet bekend met de vrijwel onmogelijke stijging van de oliereserves die de OPEC-landen in de jaren 80 doorvoerden in hun statistieken?

Antwoord - Tabel 2.1 is gebaseerd op de “2007 Survey of Energy resources” van het World Energy Council (WEC). Het WEC is een internationale netwerkorganisatie met 94 autonome Member Committees waarin per land zo veel mogelijk verschillende partijen zijn verenigd die actief zijn op energiegebied (www.worldenergy.org). De genoemde studie is tot stand gekomen met behulp van deze Member Committees. Ook is gebruik gemaakt van veel verschillende openbare informatiebronnen. Het kabinet is bekend met de doorgevoerde veranderingen in de schattingen van de reserves bij de OPEC-landen in de jaren ’80. Dit was een gevolg van de introductie van quota-afspraken binnen de OPEC-landen. De in dat kader gehanteerde sleutels bij de verdeling van de quota hebben diverse OPEC-landen ertoe gebracht hun reserveschattingen indertijd fors ophoog bij te stellen.

quote:

The credit crunch is already having an impact on energy markets. New projects are harder to fund. Highly leveraged companies are sometimes finding it necessary to shed assets. Some players are finding themselves to be the indirect casualties of other players, like Lehman, that have already failed. Long term, we will probably see consolidation and lower production than would have been the case without the credit crunch. Of course, if there is a major recession, it is possible that we won't need as high production.

quote:

Some ideas that have been suggested include:

1. More work at home plans, possibly a few days a week.

2. Using a four day (or three day) work week. (See The Four Day Work Week: Sixteen Reasons Why This Might Be an Idea Whose Time Has Come.)

3. Moving closer to work.

4. Using public transit.

5. Using car pools or van pools.

6. Using a more efficient car.

7. Using a motorcycle or moped instead of a car.

8. Using a bicycle.

Of these, work at home (1), four day work week (2), and car pools (5) seem to be the lowest cost alternatives, since they do not require the addition of any other infrastructure, and do not require moving. Using a bicycle (8) is also inexpensive, and gives a person exercise as well. More use of public transit (4) requires infrastructure investment and a longer time frame. In a credit constrained environment, they may not be as feasible.

Meer ideëen in de reacties

quote:

Op vrijdag 3 oktober 2008 13:36 schreef Liewec het volgende:
Ach, olie. Alsof de techniek niet allang vervoer kan verzinnen dat niet afhankelijk van olie is. Zolang Shell en consorten onwaarschijnlijkjoen euro per jaar verdienen met olie is het allemaal gelul in de marge. Laat de olie maar z.s.m. opraken, dan kunnen we eindelijk op water gaan rijden.

quote:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. oil demand in July fell to the lowest level for the month in 11 years, with consumption 736,000 barrels per day less than previously estimated and down 1.335 million bpd from a year earlier, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
[..]
U.S. highway travel fell by 3.6 percent, or nearly 10 billion miles in July compared to the same period last year, according to a separate report this week from the Transportation Department.

The decline was less than the drop of 5 percent, or 12.2 billion miles, reported for June.

quote:

The supply of oil from the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) in September has fallen, the first monthly decline since April, according to survey from Reuters. The survey has indicated that output from source of two in every five barrels of oil, was falling even before it agreed at a meeting in September to trim output and prop up prices.

quote:

The Energy Report for Friday, October 10th 2008

Go ahead, make my day. OPEC calls an emergency OPEC meeting for November 18th hinting that they may cut production and the oil market laughed in their face. Why would the markets take OPEC seriously when the economic dominoes are crashing down around the globe.

Some OPEC members are living in a dream world where they think that a production cut at this point might actually matter. The global credit crisis and the global market meltdown will have little sympathy for many OPEC countries that squandered their years of record profits and became more dependent on constantly rising oil profits. Once again in the quest for the political and economic power that comes from oil, comes another seismic shift away from the oil producing countries again back to the consumers.

First of all assuming that the hawkish members of the cartel can get the Saudis to agree to cut production is highly likely due to the price spike that would surely be soon to follow and thereby cause more economic pain. Many major purchases of oil usually rely on some type of bank credit anyway and it will be harder to get that credit even if you want to buy the oil. Higher prices and the lack of available credit will slow demand even more and OPEC oil producers desperate for cash will cheat on production in a desperate attempt to hang onto declining world market share. In fact this credit crisis will become so bad for oil demand that even if you have nightmares because you believe in the peak oil theory, demand declines should help you sleep well for a few mores decades or so.

Of course this will be a bitter pill for the oil producers to take that had become intoxicated with power as the result of high oil prices. Guys like Vladimir Putin in Russia and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Ahmadinejad in Iran that all rode into power surrounding the circumstances of a global economic growth oil price fed boom will be exposed for the real nothings that they are. The oil pendulum has started to swing the other way and will knock these guys on their backside and OPEC members will turn on each other and start eating their own in a desperate fight for economic survival. When you’re whole economy and the building blocks of your political power is tied to high oil prices you will rise and fall with the price.

OPEC’s best move at this point would be to pump as much oil as they can to try to save the economy from a meltdown so they could then have a chance to sell oil at a higher price in the future. Of course desperate men do desperate things and these are desperate times.

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"The concept of alternative energy has a lot of momentum," said Dan Pickering, head of research for Tudor, Pickering, Holt & Co. Securities in Houston. "But lower oil prices make it harder to justify investment. At $50 a barrel, a lot of that investment will die."

But even if oil doesn't fall that far amid global economic woes, access to capital for new ventures is tough to get despite the sector's political popularity, Pickering said after giving a presentation at an alternative energy forum sponsored by Ernst & Young.

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Why would the price of oil be dropping when supply is in an overall trend of decline if demand is robustly rising?
Well, the world is rapidly changing, and it may be that the economic decline of the US, with the accompanying decline in consumption, and therefore lowering of the demand for oil and its products, is impacting on the world oil markets. Declining demand may be lowering the level of oil scarcity and so allowing the crude prices to fall (Reuters, 2008).

The subprime mortgage industry meltdown, and its knock-on effects, may yet prove to be titanic in their full implications. The full debt problem in the US is so vast and huge, it is almost beyond comprehension.

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Op maandag 13 oktober 2008 10:18 schreef RM-rf het volgende:
laat nu net de 'peak-oil' theorie in eerste instantie weinig te maken hebben met een theorie over een piek in de prijs...
De 'peak-oil' theorie gaat vooral (eigenlijk vrijwel alleen) over het aanbod, en ziet dat aanbod als een soort van absolute variabele dat een gelijkmatige stijging kent, die stijging vervolgens afvlakt en een 'piek' bereikt en daarna langzaam afneemt'.... een produktieverloop wat inderdaad overeenkomt met de afname over één bron of olieveld bezien... veel aanhangers van de 'peak-oil' theorie zien zulk een aanbod-verloop ook over het olieaanbod in zijn algemeen, dus als je _alle_ oliebronnen(olievelden samen neemt...

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daarbij negeren veel van de mensen die de 'peak-oil-theorie' sterk aanhanger verdere invloeden als de prijs/winst op olie door producenten, en een flucturerende vraag, alswel bv invloeden als speculatie met de olieprijs ... als invloedrijk op het aanbod zélf...

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Uiteindelijk bewijzen de huidige korte-termijn prijseffecten niks over de 'peak-oil-theorie'.... niet of deze kloppend is maar evenzeer bewijzen ze een 'onwaarheid erachter... dit zou enkel bewezen kunnen worden door lange termijns effecten te bekijken (waarbij je altijd moet oppassen dat bepaalde mensen niet suggereren lange-termijns-grafieken te gebruiken maar dan opeens suggestie-lijntjes gaan doortrekken of sterk de nadruk leeggeen op prijs- of aanbod-ontwikkelingen van enkel en laatste half jaar oid.... iets wat je sterk terugziet bij bepaalde mensen die hopen de 'peak-oil-theorie' te bwijzen aan de hand van korte termijns prijseffecten)

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Op maandag 13 oktober 2008 11:19 schreef El_Matador het volgende:

[..]

Ehm, waht, dit klopt niet. De curve zelf is bijzonder gesimplificeerd en qua vorm niet correct.

Daarbij, dit gaat ook niet op voor het opsporen van nieuwe velden. Exploratie is een ander gebied dan productie, hoewel natuurlijk gerelateerd. Er spelen ook hele andere politieke, economische en technische factoren.

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Wat ik vind van Hubbert en zijn piek is dat gewoon simpele logica (eindig product en oneindige vraag, hoe ziet dat eruit in een grafiek) gepresenteerd wordt als een controversieel model dat heel gewichtig zou zijn. Je kan geen Peak-Oil tegenstander zijn ofzo, want het is gewoon logisch. Maar de "voorstanders" gebruiken ook rare retoriek.

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Op maandag 13 oktober 2008 11:40 schreef RM-rf het volgende:

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als je idd enkel kijkt naar een theoretisch model waarbij de produktie hoeveelheid enkel beinvloed door de 'mogelijkheid' een bepaalde productiehoeveelheid te behalen en alle externe variabelen die op het productieaanbod evenzeer een invloed uitoefenen eventjes niet meeberekend worden..
(dus aanbieders ook altijd zullen pogen de maximum hoeveelheid te winnen, los van winstmarges of raffineer-capaciteiten; iets dat in de realiteit nu juist een erg sterke invloed heeft op de olieproductie)

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peak-oil is in de studeerkamer ook en heel interessant model, maar voor de realiteit gewoonweg een veels te grote versimpeling om opeens als een soort van 'absolute waarheid' te gaan gebruiken waarop je bepaalde beleidshandelingen kunt baseren (waarbij ik overigens ook niet echt doorheb wat voor 'beleidshandelingen' de meeste hardcore peak-oil gelovers op het internet voorstaan anders dan heel had 'paniek-paniek-peeuw-peeuw' schreeuwen)...

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Overigens moet je daarbij ook een verschil duidelijk maken tussen 'peak-oil' als bepaald economisch theoretisch model wat wetenschappers kunnen gebruiken... en hoe heet toegepast wordt op allerhande 'eind-der-tijden' internet-sites, door mensen die het eerder als 'geloof' toepassen dan als theoretisch economisch model.

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The biggest ever sale of oil assets will take place today, when the Iraqi government puts 40bn barrels of recoverable reserves up for offer in London.

BP, Shell and ExxonMobil are all expected to attend a meeting at the Park Lane Hotel in Mayfair with the Iraqi oil minister, Hussein al-Shahristani.

Access is being given to eight fields, representing about 40% of the Middle Eastern nation's reserves, at a time when the country remains under occupation by US and British forces.

Two smaller agreements have already been signed with Shell and the China National Petroleum Corporation, but today's sale will ignite arguments over whether the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was a "war for oil" that is now to be consummated by western multinationals seizing control of strategic Iraqi reserves.

Al-Shahristani is expected to reveal some kind of "risk service agreements" that could run for up to 20 years, with formal offers to be submitted by next spring and agreements signed in the summer.
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He said that if the conspiracy theory that western oil companies egged on US and British governments to invade Iraq were true, the plan could backfire on them and benefit rivals in Asia instead. "It is possible the American army has provided the economic stability that will encourage Malaysian, Chinese and other Asian companies to become involved," he said.
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China's state-owned oil group, CNPC, has already agreed a $3bn (£1.78bn) oil services contract with the government of Iraq to pump oil from the Ahdab oil field.
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"Why choose Shell when you could have chosen ExxonMobil, Chevron, BG or Gazprom?" he asked. "Shell appears to be paying $4bn to get hold of assets that in 20 years could be worth $40bn. Iraq is giving away half its gas wealth and yet this work could have been done by Iraq itself."

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GRAND RAPIDS -- While motorists celebrate lower gas prices, a former U.S. Department of Energy official sees an opportunity: Raise fuel taxes to help end America's dependence on foreign oil.

"Unfortunately, it's high prices that cause people to be careful about energy use," said Jay Hakes, who lived in Grand Rapids as a child and is director of the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum in Atlanta.
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It would punish those who burn the most gasoline and reward those who burn less, eventually driving down demand, he said.
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"Only two presidents have told the American public that oil prices should be higher (Carter and Ford), and both lost re-election," said Hakes, head of the Energy Information Administration at the U.S. Department of Energy under President Bill Clinton.

"Presidents since that time are not willing to say that."

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For decades, the U.S. has vowed to reduce its dependence on imported oil and to find a reliable source to meet the nation's growing oil needs.

Now, Canada offers a solution.
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Also growing are the environmental costs - higher greenhouse gas emissions than conventional oil and long-term destruction of a swath of deep forest. In the past few months, Alberta officials have announced new environmental policies and plans to invest $4 billion Canadian ($3.7 billion U.S.) to cut emissions. What's clear so far is that they're facing an environmental problem - supersized.
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Demand for fuel in North America will keep oil sands production growing from 1.2 million barrels a day in 2007 to 3.5 million to 4 million barrels a day by 2020, said Alberta Oil Minister Mel Knight. "I don't see anything on the horizon that would indicate that isn't a target that's doable."
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The sands contain a form of crude oil called bitumen that's as thick as peanut butter. To remove the sand and clay to turn the bitumen into heavy crude that can flow to refineries takes a lot of energy.

For that reason, greenhouse-gas emissions from production are three to five times those of conventional oil.

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Op woensdag 15 oktober 2008 17:29 schreef ItaloDancer het volgende:
Onder de 75 dollar gedoken.

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Op woensdag 15 oktober 2008 23:51 schreef digitaLL het volgende:
Het zou maar zo kunnen dat de olieprijs langere tijd "laag" blijft en het productie plateau zover opgerekt dat alternatieven op tijd verhanden zijn

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Oil projects hammered by the credit crunch
The financial crisis that unfolded over the past weeks is quickly spreading to the real economy. New oil supply that could come on stream in the next years is also being hurt, as the combination of declining oil prices and a reluctance to invest capital due to the financial crisis is taking its toll. From events in the past few weeks it has become clear that several companies that are active in the more difficult plays such as the Canadian Tar Sands are postponing investments. In addition, insecure regions for investors including Nigeria are also suffering from an additional risk burden posed by the credit crunch.

Such behaviour will result in a production level that is significantly lower on the mid term, the next 2 to 5 years, than the level that would have been reached without the effects of the credit crunch. The amount of production that will not be realised is unknown at the moment. Looking at 2008 numbers, an approximate daily production of 3.5 million barrels per day will be added to the supply stream in the next couple of years from up to 70 oil field projects that wil see first production begin to flow in 2008. These investments have already taken place so the impact of the credit crunch on these projects will be small to negligible. But when looking at the type of projects for 2009 an 2010, years similar production flows from startups are expected as in 2008, at least 20% of flows are likely to be postponed for at least one year as the financial crisis continues to unwind.

The credit crunch will even lead to such a result as oil prices rebound on the short term. To my expectation a rebound will begin at the end of October that could lead to a price of 90 to 100 dollars per barrel at the end of the year. Caused by a combination of a significant OPEC production cut as well as demand dynamics. OPEC already cut supply by 350,000 b/d in September unofficially, and a special meeting is planned for 24 October in which further supply cuts can be expected. A production cut between 0.75 to 1.25 million barrels per day will likely be announced which includes the unofficial September cut. Demand is set to increase from the end of October mainly due to Japan’s seasonal increase in oil consumption of 0.6 to 1.0 million barrels per day in winter versus summer. Also China is importing much more oil now than earlier this year as the oil price decline gives a short window of opportunity to take advantage off for the fastest growing economy in the world in terms of energy usage.

While a price of 90 to 100 dollar makes all the planned projects for 2009 and 2010 economical again, even those in very difficult plays, such an increase will not be enough to solve the investment issue. Not only because there is little certainty of such a price to be sustained for a long time in the current market, thus making investment itself a risk taking issue, but more importantly, it is unlikely that the credit crisis will have been resolved over the course of a few months. And so long as there is no access to major sums of money, investments for difficult projects are off the table. The situation will unfortunately continue for the duration of at least a few months, and probably much longer.
Rembrandt Koppelaar
President ASPO Netherlands

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Op woensdag 22 oktober 2008 00:21 schreef El_Matador het volgende:
3/4 van de olieprijs is speculatie, dat hebben de recente prijsfluctuaties gewoon keihard aangetoond.

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1. Credit problems of oil intermediaries
2. Liquidation of positions by hedge funds and other speculators
3. Hedging of future oil prices by oil companies
4. Rise in the value of the dollar
5. Trend Trading or Systematic Trading
6. Drop in Asian growth
7. Small size of the oil (and other commodities) market, relative to the rest of the market
8. Increased volatility when supplies are very tight