Oil bulls pinning their hopes on tumbleweeds in East Texas may now be peering further south. The argument for oil rebounding after last year’s crash rests largely on cash flow-constrained Continue Reading
OPEC will maintain its production target next week, Libya’s deputy vice prime minister said, joining Kuwait in predicting no policy change when oil ministers from the 12-member group meet in Vienna next week. The output target will remain 30 million barrels a day, Mohammad Oun, Libya’s deputy vice prime minister for energy, said by phone from al-Bayda, eastern Libya. Oun will be part of Libya’s delegation to the June 5 meeting. OPEC is working on a long-term strategy draft to present next week that is likely to show projections of crude supply from non-OPEC producers are the same as those forecast in 2014, he said. “The target number will not change,” Oun said. Libya is pumping 400,000 barrels of oil a day, state-run National Oil Corp. spokesman Mohamed Elharari said in a phone interview Thursday. That makes Libya the smallest producer in OPEC. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries […]
LONDON The North American oil boom is proving resilient despite low oil prices, producer group OPEC said in its biggest and most detailed report this year, suggesting the global oil glut could persist for another two years. A draft report of OPEC’s long-term strategy, seen by Reuters ahead of the cartel’s policy meeting in Vienna next week, forecast crude supply from rival non-OPEC producers would grow at least until 2017. Sluggish global demand for oil means the call on OPEC’s crude will fall from 30 million barrels per day (bpd) in 2014 to 28.2 million in 2017, effectively leaving the group with two options – cut output from current levels of 31 million bpd or be prepared to tolerate depressed oil prices for much longer. "Since June 2014, oil prices have experienced a significant reduction, reaching levels even lower than the crisis experienced in 2008, yet non-OPEC supply is […]
KHOBAR, Saudi Arabia OPEC is not expected to cut oil production at its meeting in June, and the meeting is expected to be a short one, Saudi Arabia’s Al Hayat newspaper quoted an unnamed OPEC source as saying on Thursday. Saudi Arabia will continue producing oil to meet customer demand, and its output is now at about 10.3 million barrels per day in light of growth in demand from China and India, the source added. He said Saudi Arabia would not sacrifice its market share for other people’s interests, especially if there was no cooperation on oil policy from outside OPEC – a line which has been stated repeatedly by Saudi officials in recent months. Al Hayat is a major Saudi newspaper with a strong reputation for covering oil policy. (Reporting by Reem Shamsedine, Writing by Andrew Torchia)
LONDON The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries denied a Wall Street Journal story which said the producer group saw oil prices below $100 a barrel in the next decade. "The article refers to a number of scenarios, including crude oil price assumptions out to 2025, and also claims the report recommends a return to a production quota system," OPEC’s headquarters said in the statement. "The OPEC Secretariat would like to stress that these and other statements made in the WSJ article have no basis whatsoever." It is rare for OPEC to publicly deny press articles about the organization. (Reporting by Alex Lawler , editing by William Hardy)
A monstrous and ever expanding elephant sits in the green crusaders’ room. Amidst all the liberal internationalist angst about greenhouse gases and pollution generally, the greatest and most obvious cause of both is ignored by mainstream politicians: the already great and rapidly rising population of the world. The world population is estimated to be over 7 billion now. Extrapolations to 2050 go as high as 9.5 billion. The vast majority living now come from the underdeveloped world and their proportion of the world population will increase in the coming decades because the populations of underdeveloped countries have much younger populations than those of the developed world. One of every six people on earth is an adolescent. In the developing world, more than 40 percent of the population is under age 20. The decisions these young people make will shape our world and the prospects of future generations. Let us […]
A coal shoot loads barges with coal outside Pittsburgh. ENLARGE Photo: Bloomberg News The global economy is awash as never before in commodities like oil, cotton and iron ore, but also with capital and labor—a glut that presents several challenges as policy makers struggle to stoke demand. “What we’re looking at is a low-growth, low-inflation, low-rate environment,” said Megan Greene, chief economist of John Hancock Asset Management, who added that the global economy could spend the next decade “working this off.” The current state of plenty is confounding on many fronts. The surfeit of commodities depresses prices and stokes concerns of deflation. Global wealth—estimated by Credit Suisse at around $263 trillion, more than double the $117 trillion in 2000—represents a vast supply of savings and capital, helping to hold down interest rates, undermining the power of monetary policy. And the surplus of workers depresses wages. Meanwhile, public indebtedness in […]
But American drillers could ultimately benefit from the pressure to become more competitive. And OPEC, the oil cartel led by Saudi Arabia, may end up regretting its effort to push down oil prices and destabilize American drillers. “We’re wounded but we’re not dead, for sure,” Gary Evans, CEO of Texas-based driller Magnum Hunter Resources ( MHR ), tells me in the video above. “If their goal was to crush the US oil and gas industry, that isn’t going to happen. We are a very resilient industry.” Oil prices, currently around $57 per barrel, are about 45% below peak prices from last June. Normally, when oil prices fall, Saudi Arabia and other OPEC nations cut back production, to help support prices. But they haven’t done that this time, with aggressive levels of production largely viewed as an effort to force some U.S. drillers out of the market and make sure […]
The Biggest Problem Remains Over-Population thumbnail Today, Earth Day, behooves all of us to give serious consideration on alleviating the horrific problems that plague our world, and threaten to make it uninhabitable in a very short term. At the root of all the problems, including fouled water, polluted air and soil, melting glaciers, severe crowding – not to mention mass panic migrations (such as claimed over 850 lives this week) is overpopulation . Already multiple lines of research are questioning the UN estimates that project a global population of 10.9 billion by 2100. If, however, women – mainly in the poorest nations and without access to contraceptives, have even 0.5 more offspring each (than projected) that 2100 estimate could turn into 12.3 billion or even 15.8 billion. The latter pointing to a certain ‘Soylent Green’ world. Meanwhile, Adrian Rafferty of the University of Washington, publishing in a recent issue of Science, computed there’s […]
The OPEC Monthly Oil Market Report is out with OPEC crude only production numbers for March 2015. OPEC production was up 812,000 barrels per day. The increase came primarily from three countries: Saudi Arabia Saudi Arabia was up 347,000 barrels per day to 10,010,000 bpd. Iraq was up 319,000 bpd to 3,625,000 barrels per day. And Libya was up 165,000 bpd to 473,000 bpd. Iran Zero This is Iran zero based in order to show exactly how much sanctions have affected them. Iran was producing about 3.75 million bpd before sanctions. Then when sanctions the UN resolution for sanctions was passed in 2010, but before they were enforced, production began to drop, but very slightly. It was not until late 2011 and early 2012 before production began to fall rather steeply. Iranian crude only production is now around 2.75 million bpd, down about 1 million bpd, or 27 percent […]
