This is my response to the comment of a regular reader.
There’s no easy answer to this question. I have few qualms about putting a ceiling on the oil price. In round terms, I’d say it’s $60 a barrel, since this is most likely the point at which an avalanche of new shale oil production will come on line. Also, for investing in shale oil companies this number doesn’t matter than much, so long as it’s appreciably above the current price.
A floor is harder.
a first pass through the issue
We can divide the source of oil production into three types. I’m not going to look up the numbers, but let’s say they’re all roughly equal in size:
–extremely low production cost, less than $5 a barrel, typified by production from places like Saudi Arabia
–very high production cost, like $100+ a barrel, which would be typical of exploration and production efforts of the major international oil companies over the past decade or so, and
–shale-like oil, with production costs of maybe $35 -$40 a barrel.
In practical terms, there’s never going to be an economic reason for the low-cost oil to stop flowing.
Shale oil is basically an engineering and spreadsheet exercise. The deposits are relatively small and the cost of extraction is almost all variable. So shale will switch on and off as prices dictate. We know that at the recent lows of $25 or so, all this production was shut in.
The very high production cost is the most difficult to figure out. Of, say, $100 in production expense, maybe $70 is the writeoff of exploration efforts + building elaborate hostile-environment production and delivery platforms. This is money that was spent years ago just to get oil flowing in the first place. What’s key is that for oil like this is that the out-of-pocket cost of production–money being spent today to get the oil–may be $30 a barrel. From an economic perspective, the up-front $70 a barrel should play no role in the decision to produce oil or not. So, dealing purely economically, this oil should continue to flow no matter what.
second pass
First pass says $30 – $35 a barrel is the low; $60 is the best the price gets.
Many OPEC countries (think: Saudi Arabia again) have economies that are completely dependent on oil and which are running deep government deficits. Their primary goal has to be to generate maximum revenue; the number of barrels they produce is secondary. If so, they will increase production as long as that gives them higher revenue. Their tendency will be to make a mistake on the side of producing too much, however. Their activity will make it very hard to get to a $60 price, I think.
On the other hand, shale oil producers who can make a small profit at, say, $35 a barrel may tend to shut in production at $38 – $40, on the idea that if they exercise a little patience they’ll be able to sell at $45, doubling or tripling their per barrel profit.
third pass
Second pass argues for a band between, say, $40 and $55.
Bank creditors don’t care about anything except getting their money back. They will force debtors–here we’re talking about shale oil companies–to produce flat out, regardless of price, until their loans are repaid. This was an issue last year, and what I think caused the crude price to break below $30 a barrel. I don’t think this is an issue today.
There’s a seasonal pattern to oil consumption, driven by the heating season and the driving season in the northern hemisphere. The driving season runs from April through September, the heating season from September through January. February-April is the weakest point of the year, the one that typically has the lowest prices.
If the financial press isn’t totally inaccurate, there are a bunch of what appear to be poorly -informed speculators trading crude oil. Who knows what they’re thinking?
my bottom line
This is still much more of a guessing game than I would prefer. I see three positives with shale oil companies today, however. Industry debt seems more under control. Operating costs are coming down (more on this on Monday). And seasonality should soon be providing support to prices.