Category Archives: oil and natural gas

firming oil prices: seasonal strength or something more?

October 20, 2016 By in Industry Analysis, oil, oil and natural gas, shale oil, shale oil and gas, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

September through mid-January is the period of greatest seasonal strength in oil prices.  Early in this period, refineries shift from making gasoline to supply drivers to manufacturing heating oil in advance of winter in the northern hemisphere.  There’s normally some friction in the supply chain as this takes place.  But the key reason for current oil price strength, I think, is the typical behavior of wholesalers, retailers and end users accumulating supplies of heating oil for winter use as autumn commences.

This period of strength usually ends in late January–after which there’s be no time to get newly-refined heating fuel to users before the weather warms.

What follows from February through April is the period of greatest seasonal weakness for oil.

 

What to make of current firmness in crude.  Is there any evidence that the proposed OPEC production limiting agreement is exerting upward pressure on the price?

My private hunch is that, yes, there is.  At the same time, I also think there will be little lasting (meaning over six months or a year) collective discipline to keep to promised quotas once they’re seen to be having an effect.  Budget deficits are too large and the third world us-against-them cohesiveness that enabled OPEC’s remarkable past cartel success is no longer present.

 

Still, I think that prices will be strong seasonally for a while in any event, so there’s no need to have a view on whether a production agreement will stick.  That time will come early in the new year.

At that point, for 2017 investment success, having a (correct) opinion about oil will be crucial, I think.  I’m hoping–and anticipating–that I’ll be able to make that decision on other grounds, i.e., the innate cheapness (or not) of shale-related exploration stocks, even without price increases.  In the meantime, I’m content to be on the sidelines.

 

new oil and gas finds in mature areas

October 6, 2016 By in oil and natural gas, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

a lesson from base metals

A decade of intensive exploration for base metals during the 1970s, on what proved to be the mistaken idea that their consumption must rise in lockstep with global GDP, resulted in a substantial glut of copper, zinc, lead…by the end of that decade.

Miners responded by redirecting their exploration and development efforts in two ways:

— they started looking for gold, for its high value in a small package, and

–they concentrated on areas near existing infrastructure.

This cut costs and almost immediately began to generate much-needed cash flow. In some cases, miners even went back to the tailings (dump heaps) of nineteenth-century mines to extract now-economical gold.  Yes, this effort created a glut of gold within a decade, but that’s another story.

the oil industry today

Something similar seems to be going on now in the oil industry in the US.  A few months ago, Apache announced a major discovery (3 billion barrels of oil, 75 trillion cubic feet of gas) in an overlooked area near the Permian Basin in Texas.  Two days ago, Caelus Energy, a privately-held firm, announced a potentially large find (2.4 billion barrels of light crude) in shallow water in Smith Bay in northern Alaska–close, at least in Alaska terms, to delivery systems from earlier finds by oil majors.

That exploration effort should have shifted in this direction isn’t surprising.  The large amounts of oil and gas being uncovered are.  Although no one would want to generalize from this small sample, the discoveries do seem to me to call for demands for greater evidence for any claim that oil and gas prices will rise a lot from current levels.

 

 

will OPEC cap its oil output?

September 29, 2016 By in oil and natural gas, Saudi Arabia, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

…maybe, for a short while anyway.   Ultimately, no.

Will this move shore up oil prices?

…probably not.

Yesterday OPEC announced a provisionary agreement according to which the oil cartel’s members will limit aggregate output to between 32.5 million barrels per day and 33.0 million.  At the lower end, that would remove 750,000 daily barrels (or 2.3%) from OPEC production.  According to the Financial Times, virtually all of the reduction would be by Saudi Arabia; other OPEC members promise only not to increase theirs.

Saudi Arabia has previously been dead set against any agreement of this type.  Why?   During the early 1980s oil glut, the Saudis sliced oil liftings from 13 million barrels daily to 3 million in a vain attempt to stabilize prices.  That effort failed because everyone else in OPEC cheated, boosting their output to fill the void.

That such cheating happens shouldn’t come as a shock.  It’s standard cartel behavior–and the reason most cartels fail.  The truly startling development in the modern history of commodity-producing cartels was the solidarity of OPEC in its formative years, when it was a political cartel opposing exploitation of third world countries.  It has lost its power as it evolved into the current economic one.

So, as I see it, there’s no reason not to expect widespread cheating again.

Another factor arguing against this agreement actually stabilizing crude oil prices is that OPEC doesn’t dominate world oil production as it did in the 1980s.  Four of today’s top six oil-producing countries (Russia, US, China, Canada) are not members of OPEC.  There’s every reason to expect that all of the four would boost output as/when prices start to rise.

 

To my mind, the real news the OPEC accord signals is the changed attitude of Saudi Arabia.  I think this must mean that Riyadh is in worse financial shape than is commonly believed.

Certainly, the country is radially dependent on oil   …and has become accustomed to the revenue from  $100+ per barrel prices.  So it is now running a large government budget deficit.  My guess is that it is also having a much harder time than expected in borrowing to bridge the gap between revenue and spending, and that efforts to develop other facets of the economy are not moving forward smoothly.  Saudi Arabia has just announced a salary cut for government workers, which can’t imply greater political stability.

If there is a valid reason for oil to have risen on the OPEC announcement–and I don’t think there is–it would be worries of political developments in Saudia Arabia that disrupt oil production there.

Personally, not owning any oil stocks at present, I’m thinking that the seasonal low point for demand, that is, January/February, would be a better entry time than right now.

the investigation of Exxon’s (XOM) oil and gas reserves

September 21, 2016 By in oil and natural gas, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

The Wall Street Journal has recently reported that the New York attorney general and the SEC are investigating whether the accounting XOM gives of its oil and gas reserves in its annual 10k filing is accurate.

There appear to be two points to the probes:

–the SEC wants to know if/how XOM has factored the cost of increasing environmental regulations into its evaluations

–the NY attorney general observes that other publicly traded oil and gas companies have written off $200+ billion from the balance sheet carrying value of their exploration and development assets.  XOM has done none.  He wants to know how that’s possible.

oil and gas balance sheets

These are very murky waters, for a number of reasons:

–there probably isn’t any “right” way to account for future environmental regulations.  It’s possible the SEC just wants to send a message to the industry to do something

–balance sheet writedowns aren’t required when assets become less profitable, which they obviously have as oil prices have plunged, but only when they become unprofitable.  For oil and gas fields that may have decades of future life, this requires some judgment about what future selling prices and costs will likely be

–the unprofitability test isn’t done well by well or even field by field.  It can be done for pools of assets that are as big as a given country.  For a mature company like XOM this will mean a pool can contain not only fields put into production two years ago but also ones from the 1960s, when crude went for $1 a barrel.  It’s possible that XOM has simply not been as aggressive (read: reckless) as its peers in chasing discoveries that are only viable with oil selling for over $100 a barrel.

supplementary present value disclosure

There is also another–more significant, in my view– set of calculations of the present value of oil and gas reserves that each company is required to include in its 10k.  This is a standardized measure with fixed assumptions.  The most important are that selling prices are assumed to be constant at those of the time of the report, and the discount factor to be used is a whopping 10%.

On this measure, XOM has already written down the present value of its oil and gas holdings by a gigantic amount.  From December 2012 on, the figures are as follows:

2012          $225 billion

2013          $220 billion

2014          $208 billion

2015          $71 billion.

Based on the 2015 figure it’s hard to make an argument that XOM is somehow covering up the loss in value it has experienced with the fall in oil prices.

 

crude oil: from shortage to surplus

September 16, 2016 By in oil and natural gas, shale oil, shale oil and gas, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , 1 Comment

Until very recently, petroleum industry thinking about crude oil supplies has been dominated by what has been called “peak oil theory.”  Developed by geologist and Shell Oil researcher M. King Hubbert in the 1950s, the simplest statement of the theory is that world production of crude oil would peak shortly after the year 2000, and then begin an inevitable decline.  The reason?   …all the world’s oilfields would have been discovered and fully exploited by that time.

We now know that Dr. Hubbert’s hypothesis is incorrect.  In fact, it’s wildly–even directionally–wrong, done in by the incentive of high prices and the development of hydraulic fracturing.

 

Peak oil is of more than academic interest, since strong belief that the world is facing an inevitable decline in oil production has informed the capital spending budgets of all the major oil companies for the past generation.  For them, the present situation of abundant supply at around $50 – $60 a barrel was unthinkable.  As a result, the majors have poured billions and billions of dollars into locating very high-cost hazardous-environment oil prospects that may now be not economically viable.

What happens now?

 

My mind keeps going back to the late 1990s and the mad rush to lay fiber optic cable around the world to support the internet.  Corning and a few Asian suppliers made the highest-quality glass cable.  Global Crossing and others spent immense amounts of money as they raced to complete undersea cables to connect the US to the rest of the world.  Internet traffic was expanding at such a fantastic rate that, in these firms’ minds, the fact that a whole bunch of firms were all doing so made no difference.

In hindsight, a key assumption these companies all made was that each optic fiber in a cable would be able to handle only one transmission at a time.

Then came dense wavelength division multiplexing.   DWDM amounted to putting a prism at each end of a fiber, breaking the light into a number of different wavelengths and sending a separate communication over each wavelength.   First it was two wavelengths, then four, then 256…

Suddenly the looming fiber optic shortage was an actual fiber optic glut.

What happened beak then?    The fiber optic cable business fell apart.  So too equipment suppliers like JDS Uniphase.  The most aggressive fiber optic cable layers went into bankruptcy.

 

I’ve been thinking that it’s time to poke around in the wreckage of smaller US oil exploration firms, although I suspect we may not see oil price lows until the end of the winter heating season (assuming there is one) next February.  But I also continue to think that the DWDM analogy is a reasonable one.  It suggests that there’s still lots of trouble ahead for the biggest and best-known names in the oil industry.