Category Archives: Energy

nearing crunch time for the oil price

November 16, 2015 By in Energy, Mining, Refining, shale oil, shale oil and gas Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

recap

By allowing/encouraging the oil price to stay over $100 a barrel, OPEC unwittingly created a pricing umbrella that spawned a significant new, relatively high cost, shale oil industry in the US that, at its peak last year, was pumping an extra 5 million barrels of crude a day onto the world market.  At that point, world supply rose above demand, with the natural consequence that prices began to fall.

The OPEC response ot lower prices has been to increase its production, with the intention of spurring new demand and of forcing shale oil producers out of business.  Since for most OPEC countries, oil is the principal source of GDP and of hard currency, more barrels out the door also eased revenue shortfalls somewhat.  Nevertheless, OPEC is generally experiencing a significant cash squeeze.

The plan has worked, to some degree.  American consumers have lost their taste for compact cars and are buying gas-guzzling trucks in huge numbers.  Shale oil production is gradually fading.  Overall world demand continues to rise at 1.5+ million barrels per day.

where we stand now

The excess of supply over demand is still about two million barrels per day, according to the International Energy Agency, (whose latest monthly report can be found in financial newspapaers).

The end to economic sanctions on Iran is likely to free 500,000 barrels of Persian oil for sale sometime next year, however–and that figure might be as high as a million.  And China has been using the fall in prices to increase its strategic petroleum reserve.  Some reports say that this process is close to an end.

storage is a key 

The most important near-term factor to watch, in my view, is overall world inventories–which are at extremely high levels.

Petroleum storage is of two types:

–storage of crude, normally in tank farms, but also in rented oil tankers

–refined products storage, both in tank farms owned by refiners and (the thing we know least about) in customers’ hands–from industry to the gas tanks in individuals’ automobiles.

We do know that crude tank farms in Asia and Europe are full, and that refiners’ output storage tanks are bursting at the seams.  In addition, the cost of renting a crude oil tanker to store barrels for future delivery is now higher than the profit an arbitrageur would make by buying oil now and entering a futures contract for later delivery.

On top of all that, warm weather has meant that the usual seasonal buying surge for heating oil has not yet happened.

to summarize

At the current rate of adjustment, oil supply and demand may not come into balance until late 2016–and maybe early 2017.

The world is running out of places to stash the extra crude.  The globe already appears to have run out of places to do so at a profit.

Therefore, it’s possible that, at the very least, the oil price will decline again–even in a period of seasonal strength like the present–to a level where the arbitrage of buying now and storing for future delivery makes money.  But when stuff like this happens, the world is rarely rational.  The Goldman scenario in which the crude price falls to $20 no longer seems like a footnote.  It’s something that has–I don’t know–say, a one in three chance of occurring.

If that happens, I think it would be a great chance to sift through the rubble for medium-sized US shale oil firms that will survive until better days arrive in maybe 18 months.

 

 

thinking about 2016: oil

October 21, 2015 By in Energy, Gold, Industry Analysis, Mining, oil and natural gas, shale oil and gas Tags: , , , , , 1 Comment

Regular reader Chris commented about yesterday’s post that we may be in the early stages of a decade+ downcycle in the oil price.  I thought I’d elaborate on that thought today.

base metals–gold, too

I think the situation with base metals is very clear.  Capacity is typically added in very large increments, and by all parties in the industry at once, creating the top of the market.  The mines can be shut down, but the orebodies don’t disappear.  Neither does the machinery.  So operations can be restarted fairly easily.  As a result, the market only comes back into balance as economic growth slowly expands, eating into the oversupply overhang.  Last time around, in the early 1980s, this process took well over a decade.

oil

Th case of oil is slightly different.  The petroleum industry is far bigger and more important than metals.  In most cases, there are no good substitutes.  Use for heating and transportation can’t be postponed.

Discovery of new reserves is a much more important factor in production.  The ability of oilfields to extract output without significant new drilling can deteriorate sharply if wells are shut down, interrupting the underground flow of oil to them.  Because of this second factor, very small differences between supply and demand can have dramatic.

 

At the last oil peak in 1980-81, two factors conspired to stretch out in time the fall in prices needed to restore supply-demand balance.

–The US, the world’s largest petroleum consumer, enacted a byzantine series of price control laws to prevent higher oil prices from being passed on to consumers.  This delayed conservation into the 1980s, when the regulations were dismantled.

–Saudi Arabia, then the largest oil producer in the world, decided to cut its production in an unsuccessful attempt to prop up prices.  It went from 10+ million barrels per day in 1980 to just over 3 million in 1985.  Although other OPEC members also agreed to curtail production, widespread cheating (typical cartel behavior) undermined the supply reduction effort.  The oil market finally bottomed at around $8 a barrel (the high was $34 in December 1980) when the Saudis got fed up and began to restore production in 1986.

 

This time, neither factor is present.  The only residual of 1970s efforts to promote oil use in the US is the country’s relatively low level of tax, by world standards, on gasoline.  Saudi Arabia, having learned a bitter lesson from the 1980s, has actually increased production slightly.

 

I think this means that the bottom for oil will come much more quickly than in the 1980s.  It may be happening now.

I don’t think there will be a quick rebound, however, even though the excess supply now present in the world may only amount to 2% – 3% of total demand.  That’s because:

–demand is growing more slowly than experts have been predicting

–hydraulic fracturing is proving less vulnerable to lower prices, as frackers streamline their procedures to lower costs (no one worried about efficiency when oil was $100 a barrel)

–removal of economic sanctions on Iran will give a one-time boost to supply of about 500,000 barrels a day (on world production of roughly 90 million bbl/’day).

my thoughts

If I had to guess, I’d say that fracking has permanently changed the supply/demand situation in oil.  New capacity can be added quickly, in lots of small increments, at around $60 a barrel.  I think this puts a (permanent?) ceiling on the oil price, or at least one that lasts for longer than we as investors need to worry about.

The bottom is harder to figure out.  If we were back in 1980, when world demand was about 60 million barrels a day and almost half came from ultra-low-cost sources in OPEC, revisiting the 1986 lows might be an ugly but realistic option.  However, with production now around 90 million and the Middle East closer to an afterthought than a real price-setting power, enough output is being curtailed at current prices that I think we’re probably in the bottoming process now.

At some point, aggressive investors will sift through left-for-dead small exploration companies to find survivors.  I’m sure industry experts are already doing so.  I’m not an expert any more.  I’m not doing so yet.  My inclination is to look for consumer or tech companies that stand to benefit from the boost to economic activity created by lower oil.

 

will the poor performance of Energy, Materials and Industrial sectors derail the S&P 500?

October 6, 2015 By in Current Market Thoughts, Energy, Japanese development, Portfolio management, securities markets, stock market, Strategy Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

In the course of doing a performance attribution for the S&P 500 year-to-date last week, I noted that the S&P 500 ex Energy, Materials and Industrials, is pretty close to flat so far this year on a total return basis.

But is it correct to conclude that the “healthy” sectors of the S&P will continue to be relatively immune to the economic illness caused by the price collapse of global mining commodities?   …or will they eventually be dragged down if, as I expect, commodity weakness continues for an extended period of time.

This isn’t as silly a question as it might seem at first.

In the early 1990s I was asked by the board of the company I worked for to present my views on the stock market in Japan at that time.  I created a presentation that divided the Topix index, which was trading at about 70x earnings, into three parts:

–highly speculative property-related companies that were trading at around 500x earnings and made up 10% of the market

–export-oriented industrials, such as the autos or tech companies like Canon, which were trading at 15-20x earnings and made up 30% of the market, and

–everything else, which made up 60% of the market and traded at around 25x.

I said what I believed:  that, while the index might do poorly as the speculatives came back to earth and the bulk of the market went sideways, the export-oriented stocks were cheap and would go up significantly in price–not only in yen but in dollars, too.  My model was the behavior of the US market throughout the second half of the 1970s, when former speculative favorites, the Nifty Fifty, were crushed while everything else went up.

An aside: a famous finance academic on the board, who made it clear he had not sought the opinion of a mere “practitioner” like me, objected that the low dividend yields of Japanese stock proved they remained wildly overvalued.  A little embarrassed (for him), I had to explain that Japanese tax laws did not provide the same preference for dividend income that the IRS did. In fact, dividend income was subject to income tax at an extremely high rate (up to 90%) in Japan.  Because of this, taxable investors (the majority at that time) had a very strong preference for (untaxed) capital gains.  Companies tended to make negligible cash payouts and to use stock dividends as a substitute.

Embarrassingly (for me), it turned out that my reasonable analysis was completely wrong.  Yes, the exporters were cheap, but for the next decade they significantly underperformed similar-quality companies elsewhere in the world.  In this case, the general economic funk that engulfed the Japanese economy hurt the stocks of all firms listed there.  There was no escape.

my thoughts

Thee aren’t a whole lot of relevant examples of this kind of situation to generalize from.  (Another might be the worldwide collapse in the price of mining commodities and of commodities stocks from 1982-86, which did not impede the upward progress of global stock markets from mid-1982 on.)

My hunch is that the contamination of “good” stocks in 1990s Japan is more a function of the continuing economic malaise in that country than of anything else.  What’s somewhat troubling is that the US today is very similar demographically to Japan back then, when lack of workforce growth was a significant contributor to Japan’s stagnation.  We have the same woes of extremely low interest rates and an impotent legislative arm tied to the status quo and unwilling to use fiscal policy to bolster the economy–another set of lead weights dragging Japan down.

 

At the end of the day, I’d argue that the US is inherently a much more dynamic country than others in the developed world.  Also, I see the commodities collapse as much more like an external shock than a sign of weakness in the domestic economy in the way the property collapse in Japan was.  So I see the chances that commodities/commodity stock softness will cripple the rest of the US stock market as low.  But there are enough similarities between us today and Japan 25 years ago to make me vaguely uneasy.

 

 

 

what would $20 a barrel oil mean for stocks?

September 17, 2015 By in Energy, oil and natural gas, Portfolio management, stock market, Strategy Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

Yesterday I wrote about the recent Goldman report speculating that oil might fall to $20 a barrel.

What would this mean for stocks?

a $40 ceiling…

To my mind, the most important observation is the simplest–the potential price fall would be caused by more oil being supplied than the world wants or needs or is able to store profitably for future use.  The price would decline to force marginal production off the market.

In other words, there’s significant oversupply at $40 a barrel.  Therefore, $40 becomes the new ceiling for oil, which would presumably bounce between it and the floor of $20.  The $60-$70 a barrel level, which markets now believe to be the near-term price ceiling, becomes a pipe dream.

…that would be hard to break through

Yes, demand for oil has been showing a trend rise of about 1% per year, and a lower price will encourage higher use but since the extent of oversupply is hard to know for sure, the safest assumption, I think, is that it would take a looong time to break through the $40 ceiling.

substitutes are hurt

A lower oil price makes substitute forms of energy–from coal and natural gas to nuclear to wind and solar–relatively less attractive.  In the US, we’ve already seen demand for automobiles is shifting away from fuel efficiency to gas guzzling because of $40 a barrel oil.  This trend to would likely accelerate if oil falls more.  Of course, by spurring more profligate use of oil, this trend should sow the seeds for future oil price increases.  Still, my guess is that upward price pressure takes a long time to develop.

producers vs. consumers

countries

Lower prices would be a boon for oil-consuming nations.  For developing countries dependent on oil production for economic growth, however, lower prices would force significant–and possibly very politically messy–structural change.  We’re already seeing this in Saudi Arabia, for instance.

industries (in the US)

Financially strapped oil producers would be in worse trouble than they are now.  Bad, too, for oil-related junk bonds.  The same for regional lenders specializing in oil and gas loans.

Seen from 30,000 feet, the US is a complex economic case.  Shale oil has allowed the country to displace Saudi Arabia as the #1 oil producer in the world.  On the other hand, the US is nevertheless a huge importer of foreign oil (per capita, we use twice as much oil as anyone else on earth).  While oil-producing regions–Alaska, Texas, Oklahoma, North Dakota…–would suffer from lower oil prices, the rest of the country would have its already low oil bills cut in half.

stocks

the minus column

oil producers

producers of other forms of energy

companies located in oil-producing regions

the plus side

US auto firms

oil refiners

transport companies, like airlines and truckers

consumer companies, helped by the boost to disposable income from less spent on petroleum products

??strip malls, Wal-Mart, resort destinations, other firms consumers typically drive to

businesses serving less affluent customers, who would have the greatest percentage boost to disposable income

 

 

 

 

 

 

$20 a barrel oil?

September 16, 2015 By in Energy, Industry Analysis, Mining, shale oil, shale oil and gas Tags: , , , Leave a comment

Last week, Goldman Sachs released a research report to clients in which it observed that if the world oil market develops in a less favorable way (to oil producers) than it currently anticipates, the crude oil price might plunge to as low as $20 a barrel before enough production is removed from the market for prices to stabilize.

This “doomsday” scenario has, naturally enough, captured all the press headlines.  I haven’t seen the GS report, but I do know the factors involved.  They are:

forces for price stability around $40 a barrel

  1.  Under normal conditions in a commodity market, when oversupply develops prices fall to a level below the out-of-pocket production expenses of the highest-cost producers.  This eventually causes them to stop generating output.  The reduction in supply stabilizes prices.  If producers mothball their operations and fire their workers, that itself may be enough to start prices rising again.
  2. Even for producers who are still profitable at lower prices, decreased cash flow leaves them less money to invest in project expansion.  Price uncertainty may cause them to hesitate, as well.  For those who have borrowed heavily, contracts with their lenders may force them to divert cash away from operations toward debt repayment.

forces against stability

  1. Many members of OPEC, which accounts for about a third of world oil production, have relatively simple economies that are heavily dependent on oil to fund government spending and to provide money to ordinary citizens.  Where the textbook economic response to lower prices may be to produce less, in order to maintain government plans and services (keeping citizens happy) the only response from OPEC is to produce more to generate more income.  This is arguably self-defeating   …and makes the problem worse.  Still, OPEC has raised production by about 2 million barrels a day over the past months.  And Iran is saying that once sanctions are lifted, it will begin to sell 100,000 barrels of oil a day, with presumably more in the offing.
  2. At, say, $100 a barrel, producers of petroleum from oil sands or shale have had no pressing incentives to hone their techniques.  At $40 a barrel and facing potential shutdown, they’re becoming much more inventive.  So they are finding ways to lower their costs to keep delivering output to market.

oil storage

We know that the world is now being supplied with more oil than it needs because oil inventories are rising.  Middlemen continue to be content to buy from producers because they can immediately sell for future delivery at a profit through derivatives and store the stuff in the mean time.

My experience is that although the markets have a rough idea of how much storage capacity there is–in giant storage tanks, barges, tanker ships…,  the reality is that there’s always more capacity than the consensus suspects.

What happens when every storage container is full?    …no one buys oil that comes on the market because there’s no place to put it.

the doomsday scenario

Three parts:

–shale oil producers lower their costs so that their production doesn’t fall by the 500,000 barrels/day that the market expects

–storage gets all filled up

–OPEC keeps on increasing production because it needs the money.

Middlemen turn the stuff away.  Prices plummet.

probability?

I’m not worried, so I guess I think it’s low.  In reality, no one knows.

Goldman has credibility in this field not only because it has strong commodity trading operations, but also because years ago it predicted $100+ per barrel oil when no one else thought it was possible.

Tomorrow, consequences of doomsday, were it to happen.