Category Archives: Mining

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

$80 a barrel oil

May 29, 2018 By in Current Market Thoughts, oil, oil and natural gas, shale oil, shale oil and gas, Strategy, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , 1 Comment

cartel activity

About a week ago, Saudi Arabia and Russia, two of the three largest oil producers in the world (the US is #1), announced they were discussing the mechanics of restoring half of the 1.8 million barrels of daily output foreign companies have been withholding from the market since 2016.

the objective? 

…to stop the price from advancing above $80.

To be honest, I’m a bit surprised that oil has gotten this high.  But producing countries have held to their cutback pledges to a far greater degree than they have in the past, with the result that the mammoth glut of oil in temporary storage a couple of years ago is mostly gone.  In addition, the economy of Venezuela is melting away, turning down that country’s output of heavy crude favored by US refiners.   Also, the world is worried that unilateral US withdrawal from the Iranian nuclear agreement may mean the loss of 500,000 daily barrels from that source.

On the other hand, short-term demand for oil is relatively inflexible.  Because of this, even small changes in supply or demand can result in large swings in price.   An extra 1% -2% in production drove the price from $100+ to $24 in 2014-15, for example.  The same amount of underproduction caused the current rebound.  So in hindsight, $80 shouldn’t have been so shocking.

Why $80?

Two factors, I think.  There must be significant internal pressure among producing countries to get even a small amount more foreign exchange by cheating on quotas.  Letting everyone get something may make it harder for one rogue nation to break ranks.

More importantly, a $100 price seems to trigger significant global conservation efforts, as well as to shift the search for petroleum substitutes into a higher gear.  So somewhere around $80 may be as good as it gets for producers.  And it leaves some headroom if efforts to hold the price at $80 fail.

the stocks

My guess is that most of the upward move for the oils is over.  I think there’s still some reason to be interested in financially leveraged shale oil producers in the US as they unwind the restrictions their lenders have placed on them.

 

 

 

oil right now–the Iran situation

May 8, 2018 By in oil, oil and natural gas, shale oil, shale oil and gas, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

For almost a year I’ve owned domestic shale-related oil stocks, for several reasons:

–the dire condition of the oil market, oversupplied and with inventories overflowing, had pushed prices down to what I thought were unsustainable lows

–other than crude from large parts of the Middle East, shale oil is the cheapest to bring to the surface.  The big integrateds, in contrast, continue to face the consequences of their huge mistaken bet on the continuance of $100+ per barrel oil

–there was some chance that despite the sorry history of economic cartels (someone always sells more than his allotted quota) the major oil-producing countries, ex the US, would be able to hold output below the level of demand.  This would allow excess inventories to be worked off, creating the possibility of rising price

–the outperformance of the IT sector had raised its S&P 500 weighting to 25%, historically a high point for a single sector.  This suggested professional investors would be casting about for other places to invest new money.  Oil looked like a plausible alternative.

 

I’d been thinking that HES and WPX, the names I chose, wouldn’t necessarily be permanent fixtures in my portfolio.  But I thought I’d be safe at least until July because valuations are reasonable, news would generally be good and I was guessing that the possibility of a warm winter (bad for sales of home heating oil) would be too far in the future to become a market concern before Labor Day.

 

Iranian sanctions

Now comes the reimposition of Iranian sanctions by the US.

Here’s the problem I see:

the US imposed unilateral sanctions like this after the Iranian Revolution in 1979.  As far as oil production was concerned, they were totally ineffective.  Why?  Oil companies with access to Iranian crude simply redirected elsewhere supplies they had earmarked for US customers and replaced those barrels with non-Iranian output.  Since neither Europe nor Asia had agreed to the embargo, and were indifferent to where the oil came from, the embargo had no effect on the oil price.

I don’t see how the current situation is different.  This suggests to me that the seasonal peak for the oil price–and therefore for oil producers–could occur in the next week or so if trading algorithms get carried away, assuming it hasn’t already.

 

 

oil inventories: rising or falling?

April 10, 2017 By in algorithmic trading, oil, securities markets, shale oil, shale oil and gas, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

The most commonly used industry statistics say “rising.”

However, an article in last Thursday’s Financial Times says the opposite.

The difference?

The FT’s assertion is that official statistics emphasize what’s happening in the US, because data there are plentiful.  And in the US, thanks to the resurgence of shale oil production, inventories are indeed rising.  On the other hand, the FT reports that it has data from a startup that tracks by satellite oil tanker movements around the world, which seem to demonstrate that the international flow of oil by tanker is down by at least 16% year on year during 1Q17.

Tankers move about 40% of the 90+million barrels of crude brought to the surface globally each day.  So the startup’s data implies that worldwide shipments are down by about 6 million daily barrels.  In other words, supply is now running about 4 million daily barrels below demand–but we can’t see that because the shortfall is mostly occurring in Asia, where publicly available data are poor.

If the startup information is correct, I see two investment implications (neither of which I’m ready to bet the farm on, though developments will be interesting to watch):

–the global crude oil supply/demand situation is slowly tightening, contrary to consensus beliefs, and

–in a world where few, if any, experienced oil industry securities analysts are working for brokers, and where instead algorithms parsing public data are becoming the norm, it may take a long time for the market to realize that tightening is going on.

It will be potentially important to monitor:  (1) whether what the FT is reporting proves to be correct; (2) if so, how long a lag there will be from FT publication last week to market awareness; and (3) whether the market reaction will be ho-hum or a powerful upward movement in oil stocks.  If this is indeed a non-consensus view, and I think it is< then the latter is more likely, I think, than the former.

This situation may shed some light not only on the oil market but also on how the discounting mechanism may be changing on Wall Street.

 

 

 

why have oil production costs fallen so much?

March 21, 2017 By in oil, oil and natural gas, shale oil, shale oil and gas, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

rules for commodities

From years of analyzing oil, gas and metals mining–as well as watching agricultural commodities and high-rise real estate out of the corner of my eye–I’ve come to believe in two hard and fast rules:

–when prices begin to fall, they continue to do so until a significant amount of productive capacity becomes uneconomic and is shut down.  That’s when the selling price of output won’t cover the cash cost of production.  Even then, management often doesn’t reach for the shutoff valve immediately.  It may hope that some external force, like a big competitor shutting down, will intervene (a miracle, in other words) to improve the situation.  Nevertheless, what makes a commodity a commodity is that the selling price is determined by the cost of production.

–it’s the nature of commodities to go through boom and bust cycles, with periods of shortage/rising prices followed by over-investment that generates overcapacity/falling prices.  The length of the cycle is a function of the cost of economically viable new capacity.  If that means the the price of new seed that sprouts into salable goods in  less than a year, the cycle will be short.  If it’s $5 billion to develop a gigantic deep-water offshore hydrocarbon deposit that will last for 30 years, the cycle will be long.

boom and bust spending behavior

During a period of rising prices, cost control typically goes out the window for commodity producers.  Their total focus is on adding capacity to satisfy what appears at that moment to be insatiable demand.  Maybe this isn’t as short-sighted as it appears (a topic for another day).  But if oil is selling for, say $100 a barrel, it’s more important to pay double or triple the normal rate for drilling rigs or mud or new workers–even if that raises your out-of-pocket costs from $40 to, say, $60 a barrel lifted out of the ground.  Every barrel you don’t lift is an opportunity loss of at least $40.

When prices begin to fall, however, industry behavior toward costs shifts radically.  In the case of oil and gas, some of this is involuntary.  Declining profits can trigger loan covenants that require a firm to cease spending on new exploration and devote most or all cash flow to repaying debt instead.

In addition, though, at $50 a barrel, it makes sense for management to:  haggle with oilfield services suppliers;  do more ( or, for some firms initiate) planning of well locations, using readily available software, to optimize the flow of oil to the surface;  optimize fracking techniques, again to maintain the highest flow; streamline the workforce if needed.   From what I’ve read about the recent oil boom, during the period of ultra-high prices none of this was done.  Hard as it may be to believe, getting better pricing for services and operating more efficiently have trimmed lifting expenses by at least a third–and cut them in half for some–for independent wildcatters in the US.

 

This experience is very similar to what happened in the long-distance fiber optic cable business worldwide during the turn of the century internet boom.  As the stock market bubble burst and cheap capital to build more fiber optic networks dried up, companies found their engineers had built in incredibly high levels of redundancy into networks (meaning the cables could in practice carry way more traffic than management thought) and had also bought way to much of the highest-cost transmission equipment.  At the same time, advances in wave division multiplexing meant that each optic fiber in the cable could carry not only one transmission but 4, or 8, or 64, or 256…  The result was a swing from perceived shortage of capacity to a decade-long cable glut.

My bottom line for oil:  $40 – $60 a barrel prices are here to stay.  If they break out of that band, the much more likely direction is down.