Category Archives: shale oil

oil below $20 a barrel

April 16, 2020 By in Autos, oil, oil and natural gas, shale oil, Strategy, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

The Energy sector of the S&P 500 makes up 2.8% of the index, according to the S&P website.  This is another way of saying that none of us as investors need to have an opinion about oil and gas production, which makes up the lion’s share of the sector.

Last weekend Saudi Arabia and Russia, with a fig leaf provided by the US for Mexico’s non-participation, led an oil producers’ agreement to cut production by around 10 million barrels daily.

Prior to the meeting, crude had rallied from just over $20 to around $23.  Right after, however, the Saudis announced price discounts reported to be around $4 barrel for buyers in Asia.  Prices were reduced by a smaller amount in Europe but went up for US customers–apparently at the Trump administration’s request.  That sent crude prices into the high teens.

Why is this the best strategy for Saudi Arabia?

The commonsense answer is that Riyadh thinks it’s more important to secure sales volumes than it is to be picky on price.  This is at least partly because the world output cuts reduce, but by no means eliminate, the oversupply.  So there are still going to be plenty of barrels looking for a buyer.  Another reason is that since demand has dried up the Russian ruble has dropped by 20%.  That’s like a 25% local currency price increase for Russian crude, meaning lots of room for Moscow to undercut rivals.

investment implications

The most leveraged play to changes in oil prices is oilfield services.  Companies that specialize in exploration–seismic services, drilling rig firms–are the highest beta, firms that service existing wells less so.  During the oil price crash of the early 1980s, however,  drilling rigs were stacked for a decade or so.  On the other hand, oilfield services firms are the ultimate stock market call on rising oil prices.

Given that US hydrocarbon output and usage are roughly equal, the country as a whole should be indifferent to price changes (yes, it’s more complicated, but at this point we want only the general lay of the land) rather than the net winner it was 15 years ago.  However, within the country oil consumers normally come out ahead, while oil producers are losers.

Typically, the resulting low gasoline prices would be a boon to truckers and to commuting drivers.  The first is probably still the case, the second not so much.

The bigger issue, I think, is the fate of the Big Three Detroit auto producers, who are being kept afloat by federal government policies that encourage oil consumption and protect high-profit US-made light trucks from foreign competition.  While nothing can explain the wild gyrations of Tesla (TSLA) shares, one reasonable interpretation of the stock’s resilience is the idea that the current downturn will weaken makers of combustion engines and accelerate the turn toward electric vehicles.

Personally, I’m in no rush to buy TSLA shares–which I do own indirectly through an ARK ETF.  But it’s possible both that Americans won’t buy new cars for a while (if gasoline prices stay low, greater fuel economy won’t be a big motivator).  And the rest of the world is going electric, reducing the attractiveness of Detroit cars abroad, and probably making foreign-made electrics superior products.

If there’s any practical investment question in this, it’s:  if the driving culture in the US remains but the internal combustion engine disappears, who are the winners and losers?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

energy: oil

April 13, 2020 By in oil, oil and natural gas, shale oil, shale oil and gas, Strategy, Uncategorized Tags: , , , Leave a comment

history

–oil began replacing coal as fuel of choice in the early 20th century, but that loss was mostly offset by substitution of coal for wood, until…

…at the end of WWII, Saudi Arabia, having lost its primary source of revenue, Hajj pilgrims, in the prior decade-plus, opened its oil deposits to foreign development.  

–Third-world producing countries formed OPEC in 1960 as a political organization to battle exploitation by oil-consuming countries.  In the 1970s, OPEC “shocked” the world by raising the price of crude oil in two stages from $1 barrel to $7.  In the panic that ensued after the second increase the price spiked to over $30 before collapsing and staying low for years.

–During the 1970s oil crisis, every major consuming nation other than the US acted decisively to decrease dependence on oil.  If anything, the US did the opposite.  One result of our misguided policy (to protect domestic auto firms) has been that although the US represents 6% of the world’s population it consumes 20% of global oil output.  Another, despite this + trade protection of domestic carmakers, has been loss of half the domestic auto market to better-made, more fuel-efficient imports.  (In most cases this is what happens–protection weakens the protected sector.)

supply/demand

price dynamics

Pre-pandemic, the world was producing about 100 million barrels of oil daily.  It consumed about the same.  Oil supply is relatively inflexible.  In over-simple terms, once a large underground pool of oil start to flow toward a well, it’s difficult to stop without harming its ability to start up again.  Because of this, even small supply excesses and shortfalls can induce sharp price changes.

supply

The biggest oil producers are:

US          19.5 million barrels/day (includes natural gas liquids.  crude alone = 12.7 million)

Saudi Arabia          12 million

Russia          11.5 million

Canada, China, UAE, Iraq, Iran      each 4 – 5 million

demand

The biggest oil consuming countries are:

US          20 million barrels/day

EU          15 million

China          13.5 million

India, Japan, Russia      each about 4 million

my stab at production costs (which is at least directionally correct)

Saudi Arabia        less than $5/barrel

Russia          $30/barrel

US fracking          $40/barrel

where we stand toady

The coronavirus outbreak appears to have reduced world oil demand by about 15 million barrels a day.  Enough surplus oil is building up that global storage capacity will soon be completely full.  Also, a spat broke out between Saudi Arabia and Russia over production cutbacks to support prices.  When the two couldn’t agree, the Saudis began to dump extra oil on the market.

West Texas Intermediate, which closed last year just above $60 a barrel, plunged to just above $20 a barrel in late March.  It goes for about $24 as I’m writing this late Sunday night, despite Moscow and Riyadh seemingly paving patched up their differences last week and agreeing to cut their output by 10 million barrels between them.  The market was not impresses, as the Friday WTI quote shows.

fracking

The US is in a peculiar position:

–the administration in Washington appears to have two conflicting energy goals:  to keep use of fossil fuels as high as possible; and to keep the world oil price high enough to make fracking profitable.  The first argues for lower prices, the second for higher.

–according to the Energy Information Administration, fracking accounted for 7.7 million barrels of daily crude oil liftings in the US last year, or 63% of the national crude total.   If the cost numbers above are anywhere near accurate, domestic frackers are in deep trouble at today’s oil price  

This doesn’t mean production will come to a screeching halt. 

The industry has two problems:  excessive debt and high total costs.  According to the Wall Street Journal, Whiting Petroleum, a fracker who recently declared bankruptcy, prepared for pulling the plug by drawing its full $600 million credit line, swapping stock in the reorganized company to retire $2 billion in junk bonds and paying top executives a total of $14.5 million.  That solves problem number one. 

As to number two, total costs break out into capital costs (leases, drilling…) and operating costs.  I have no idea what the split is for Whiting and I have no interest in trying to figure it out.  My guess is that the company can generate positive cash flow even at today’s prices.  Almost certainly the reorganized company can.  It may choose to shut its existing wells in the hope of higher prices down the road.  But it could equally well opt to continue to operate just to keep experienced crews together.  However, new field development is likely off the table for now.

my take

When I was an oil analyst almost (gulp!) a generation ago, the ground level misunderstanding the investment world had about OPEC was the belief that it was an economic organization, a cartel, not the political entity that it actually was.  The difference?–economic cartels invariably fail as members cheat on quotas; political groups have much more solidarity.  Today’s OPEC, I think, is much more an economic cartel than previously.  In other words, it can no longer control prices.  And despite the fact that Putin and MSB have extraordinary sway over the administration in Washington, my guess is this won’t help, either.

There’s some risk that investing in oil today is like investing in firewood in 1900 or coal in 1960.

Despite this, for experts in smaller US oil exploration companies, I think there will be a lot of money to be made after a possible wave of bankruptcies has crested.  Personally, I’d rather be making videos.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

an ugly day: coronavirus + oil

March 9, 2020 By in coronavirus, Current Market Thoughts, oil, shale oil, Strategy, Uncategorized Tags: , , , 6 Comments

oil

In normal times, the world produces about 100 million barrels of oil daily and consumes about the same amount.  Small changes in either supply or demand can cause huge changes in price.  That’s because demand–autos, jet fuel, heating oil…is relatively inflexible (if seasonal).  Supply is also inflexible, because a cartel of suppliers, led by Saudi Arabia has been able to control output levels.  Their goal:  highest price possible without encouraging substitution.

A problem has surfaced, however.  A mild winter + reduced demand from airlines have combined to cause a potential supply overhang.  Negotiations between Saudi Arabia and Russia about production cuts to offset this and keep prices high broke down.  Not only that, but the Saudis have apparently decided to punish Russia (and themselves) by starting to sell large amounts of oil at about $30 a barrel, or $10 a barrel below Friday’s price.

Implications:

–the consensus view is that Saudi Arabia, radically dependent on oil exports, needs a price of $80+ to balance its budget; Russia, smaller and economically much weaker, needs $40+.  So both are it trouble.  Riyadh’s calculation must be that Moscow will soon feel the pain more quickly and will agree to production cuts

–a $30 price has two bad consequences for oil production companies in the US and elsewhere.  The lower price reduces revenues and profits.  This is an acute problem for some US shale companies, which have borrowed heavily in the junk bond market.  In addition, a standard way of evaluating natural resource companies is to compare the stock price with the per share value of the reserves they hold.  The price fall not only reduces the value of those reserves but also shrinks the amount, since some oil that’s viable at $40 becomes economically unfeasible to drill for at $30.

–if oil companies make up 4% of the S&P 500 and we say that they have lost a third of their value over the weekend, then the S&P should open 1.2% lower because of that.  Add in banks that will be in trouble and maybe that figure drops to down 2%.  Conceptually offsetting that would be the benefit to oil consumers of lower prices.  But that’s a diffuse group that is typically overlooked in a market downdraft   …and in this case prime beneficiaries like transport companies are being hit by coronavirus fears.

–as I’m writing, the S&P 500 is trading down about 5% in the premarket.  So the other 3% must be due to other factors–presumably coronavirus fears.  Those, in turn, break out, I think, into two factors:  the virus itself and the efforts of the Trump administration to prevent disease preparedness, information exchange and treatment.  To my mind, the last is the scariest part.

–if we were to posit no AI involvement in the premarket decline, this would look to me like the start of an old-fashioned selling panic.  In an AI-driven world, however, it’s not clear that that the idea of a cathartic release of pent-up fear setting the emotional stage for the next upswing still holds water.

All in all, for almost everyone a day to turn off the screen and go out in the sunshine.

how the market looks to me today

November 15, 2018 By in Current Market Thoughts, oil, shale oil, Strategy, Technical Analysis, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

It may be that the market downdrift we’ve been experiencing since early October started out as a bout of yearend mutual fund selling, as I’ve been writing for a while.  Maybe not.  In any event, the selling has continued for far longer than the mutual fund hypothesis can explain.

It may be that the market has been thinking that the prices of IT-related shares had gotten far too high, given their earnings prospects.  Strike out the “far” and I’d have to agree; in my mind, the big issue preventing at least a temporary market rotation away from tech has been, and remains, what other group to rotate into.

It’s also possible that the operative comparison has been between stocks and bonds.  The ongoing upward yield curve shift now has short-term Treasury notes yielding around 2.5% and the 10- and 30-year yielding above 3%.  Arguably this is a level where income-hungry Baby Boomers could feel they should allocate somewhat away from stocks and into fixed income.

Whatever the market’s motivation, however, I’m sticking with my idea that the S&P bottomed on October 29th.

 

Many times, when the market has hit a low and has begun to rebound, it will reverse course to “test” the previous low.  Also arguably, that’s what has been happening over the past week or so–formation of what technicians in their arcane lingo call a “double bottom.”  The main worry with this idea is that two weeks after the initial low is an unusually short time for the double bottoming to be happening.  Still, it’s my working hypothesis that this is, in fact, what’s going on.

The things to monitor are whether the market breaks below the late October low and, if so, whether it breaks below the April or February lows.

 

Another topic:  oil.  Crude oil and oil stock prices have been plunging recently.  Most non-US producers added extra current output to offset the assumed negative impact of the US placing renewed sanctions on the purchase of oil from Iran.  At the last minute, however, Washington granted exceptions to large purchasers of Iranian crude.  Because of this, oil has continued to flow in addition to the extra oil from OPEC.  Since demand for oil is relatively inflexible, even 1% – 2% changes in supply can cause huge changes in price.  Whether or not the US deliberately set out to deceive OPEC and thereby cause the current oversupply, the price of oil is down sharply since the US acted.

Saudi Arabia and Russia have just announced supply cuts.  Given that Feb – April is the weakest season of the year for oil demand, it’s not clear how long it will take for the reductions to lift the oil price.  It seems to me, though, that the more important question is when rather than if.  So I’ve begun to nibble at US shale oil producers that have been flattened since Washington’s action.

OPEC and $80 oil: last week’s meeting

June 25, 2018 By in oil, shale oil, Uncategorized Tags: , , , 1 Comment

$80 per barrel oil

Over the past year the price of a barrel of crude oil has risen from $50 to $80.  The latter figure is substantially below the $100+ that “black gold” averaged during 2011-2014, but hugely higher than the low of $25-minus thee years ago.

conventional wisdom upended

Two pieces of conventional wisdom about oil have changed during the past half-decade:

–effective shale oil production technology has shelved the previous, nearly religious, belief in the near-term peaking of world oil productive capacity.  More than that,

–the development of viable electric cars has won the world over to the idea that a substantial amount of future transportation demand is going to be met by non-petroleum vehicles.

new meaning for “peak oil”

The “peak oil” worry used to be about the day when demand would outstrip supply (as emerging economies switch from bicycles/motorcycles to several cars per household–just as conventional oil deposits would begin to give up the ghost).  The term now means the day (in 2040?) when demand hits a permanent peak, and then begins to fall as renewable energy supplants fossil fuels.

new OPEC solidarity

When Saudi Arabia, the most influential member of OPEC, said during the recent supply glut that its target for the oil price was $80 a barrel, I thought the figure was much too high.  Why?  I expected that the cartel wouldn’t stick to mutually-agreed output restrictions (totaling 1.8 million daily barrels) for the years needed for oversupply to dry up and the price of output to rise.  That was wrong.

I think the main reason for OPEC’s uncharacteristic sticktoitiveness (first time I ever typed that word) is the realization that petroleum is going to yield to renewables as firewood was supplanted by coal in the mid-nineteenth century and coal was replaced by oil in the mid-twentieth.

There are other factors, though.  The collapse of the Venezuelan government means that country now produces about a million barrels a day less than two years ago.  Also, Mr. Trump’s aversion to all things Obama has prompted him to pull the US out of the Iranian nuclear agreement and reinstate an embargo.  This likely means some fall in Iranian output from its current 4.5 million or so daily barrels, as sanctions go back into effect.  Anticipation of this last has upped today’s oil price by something like $10 a barrel.

adding 600,000 barrels to OPEC daily output

Just prior to the Trump decision on Iran, Russia and Saudi Arabia were suggesting publicly that the coalition of oil producers eventually restore as much as 1.5 million barrels of daily production, as a way of keeping prices from rising further.  Mr. Trump has reportedly asked the two to make any current increase large enough to offset the $10 rise his Iran action has sparked.

Unsurprisingly, his plea appears to have fallen on deaf ears.  Last Friday the cartel announced plans to put 600,000 barrels of daily output back on the market–subject, I think, to the condition that the amount will be adjusted, up or down, so that the price remains in the $75 – $80 range.

optimizing revenue

The old OPEC dynamic was Saudi Arabia, which had perhaps a century’s worth of oil reserves and therefore wanted to keep prices steady and low vs. everyone else, whose reserve life was much shorter and who wanted the highest possible current price, even if that hastened consumers’ move to alternatives.

Today’s dynamic is different, chiefly because the Saudis now realize that the age of renewable energy is imminent.  Today all parties want the highest possible current price, provided it is not so high that it accelerates the trend to renewables.  The consensus belief is that the tipping point is around $100 a barrel.  $80 seems to give enough safety margin that it has become the Saudi target.