Month: February 2014

OPEC Update and EIA Short Term Energy Outlook

Ron Patterson 83 Comments

The OPEC Monthly Oil Market Report is just out with OPEC crude only production numbers for January 2014. OPEC Crude production was up 28,000 bp/d in January but that was after December production had been revised upward by 240,000 bp/d. November production was revised down by 51,000 bp/d.

OPEC 12

Of course Saudi is always the one to watch because it is generally believed that they have spare capacity. I think they had spare capacity back in 2011 but are now producing flat out, just like every other OPEC producer.

Saudi Arabia

Saudi crude production was down 115,000 bp/d in January but that was after December production had been revised upward by 119,000 bp/d and November revised up 52,000 bp/d. I think that surge upward early in 2013 is a telling indication. That was Manifa coming on line.

Libya had the biggest gain in January, up 270,000 bp/d to 510,000. I guess peace may be breaking out in a few places there. Without Libya’s gain OPEC production would have been down by 242,000 bp/d.

Charts of all 12 OPEC nations can be found here: OPEC Charts.

Read More

North Dakota Bakken/Three Forks Scenarios

D Coyne 226 Comments

blog1402fig1/

Figure 1

Edit(2/10/2014) For anyone interested a spreadsheet with the TRR scenario can be downloaded here just click on down arrow near the upper left to download spreadsheet.

 A recent post at Peak Oil Barrel by Jean Laherrere suggested an ultimate recoverable resource(URR) for the North Dakota Bakken/Three Forks of about 2.5 Gb based on Hubbert Linearization.  This conflicts with a recent (April 2013) USGS mean (F50) TRR estimate of 8.4 Gb. (See my earlier blog post.) 

I decided to update my scenarios based on the range of USGS TRR estimates from F95=6 Gb to F5=11.3 Gb for the North Dakota(ND) Bakken/ Three Forks.  Note that at year end 2011 there were 2.6 Gb of crude proven reserves in ND and at the end of 2007 about 0.5 Gb, I will assume all of this reserve increase came from the Bakken/ Three Forks, so 2.1 Gb of proven reserves added to 0.35 Gb of oil produced from the Bakken/ Three Forks gives us 2.45 Gb for a minimum URR.  The Hubbert Linearization points to about 0.05 Gb of undiscovered oil whereas the USGS suggests 3.5 to 8.9 Gb of undiscovered technically recoverable resource(TRR) in the North Dakota Bakken/Three Forks.

Note that Mr. Laherrere has forgotten more about geology than I know. He may have information that I don’t have access to or has read the USGS April 2013 Bakken/Three Forks assessment and found that the report was not credible.  I have assumed in my analysis that the USGS analysis is correct, if it is not then my analysis will also be flawed.  I would love to hear from Mr. Laherrere about the specific problems he sees with the USGS analysis, I no doubt would learn much.

Read More