Uncategorized – Page 139 – Peak Oil Barrel

The EIA’s Drilling Productivity Report

09/08/201409/08/2014 Ron Patterson 168 Comments

The Eia’s latest Drilling Productivity Report is out. However they have only updated the PDF file. The spreadsheets have not been updated and still have last month’s data. But I will give you what the PDF file shows and perhaps add some charts tomorrow if they get around to updating the Excel spreadsheets.

The EIA says Bakken new wells will produce 100,000 bpd in October but all the old wells will decline by 73,000 bpd and leave a net increase of 27,000 bpd. If these numbers are correct and September production was 1,152,000 bpd then that means the monthly decline rate is 6.33%.

The EIA says Eagle Ford new wells will produce 154,000 bpd in October but all the old wells will decline by 123,000 bpd and leave a net increase of 31,000 bpd. If these numbers are correct and September production was 1,551,000 bpd then that means the monthly decline rate is 7.93%.
Read More

Petroleum Supply Monthly and Other News

09/02/201409/04/2014 Ron Patterson 217 Comments

The EIA’s Petroleum Supply Monthly has just come out. That report gives production from individual states as well as offshore production.

The below chart is thousand barrels per day with the last data point June 2014.

For February, March and April there is about 60 thousand barrel per day difference between what the EIA and BSEE reports. Eventually the EIA and BSEE will be the same and it will be the EIA data that suffers the greatest revisions. I believe they have the June GOM numbers quite a bit too high here.

The EIA is still tweaking its guess as to what Texas production will be when it finally comes in.
Read More

Who’s Got Liquids? plus Further to the Bakken

08/29/201408/30/2014 Ron Patterson 192 Comments

This is another Guest Post by David Archibald

Who’s Got Liquids?

An article by Canadian consultant Mike Priaro in the 7th July, 2014 edition of Oil andGas Journal, “Grosmont carbonate formation increases Alberta’s bitumen reserves”, included the following tables:

Mr Priaro’s estimate of Canada’s recoverable bitumen is 818 billion barrels. Almost all of that is in Alberta. Combined with their coal resources, Alberta has the biggest fossil fuel resource on the planet. I have updated my estimate of what some of the major countries have in the way of fossil fuels in this table:

The highest value fuels are those that can be used as liquids in transport. High quality coal produces 2.2 barrels of liquids through a FT plant. In the following graphic I have used a factor of 2x to convert coal to its oil equivalent. Six thousand cubic feet of gas has the energy equivalent of one barrel of oil. Natural gas can be used directlyin some transport applications. Putting it through an FT plant to make diesel, for example, would lose at least 30% of its initial energy. Natural gas has traditionally traded at the oil price in the US and conceivably might return to close to that level in a tight market. So in the following graph, natural gas in TCF is divided by six to produce its oil equivalent in billions of barrels. This is the graph:

Read More

Bakken Oil Peak by Jean Laherrère

08/23/201408/23/2014 Ron Patterson 312 Comments

This is a guest post by Jean Laherrère

The problem of forecasting future Bakken production is that estimating reserves of shale oil is harder than for conventional oil and is very unreliable because many confuse reserves and resources, and shale oil reserves depend more from economy than from technology. Many estimate the amount of hydrocarbons generated by the source-rock and believe that a significant percentage could be recovered: the study of the main Petroleum Systems in the world estimate than only about 1% will recovered in conventional fields, no more could be expected in unconventional fields.
US Shale gas production started in 1821 in Fredonia for lighting when whale oil price was about 2000 $2014/b, but was replaced by conventional oil in 1859 because a largely lower price.

How to estimate future production?

Drilling activity is a good way to model production with a shift.
In my MIT Paris paper «The end of the peak oil myth» MIT club de France- Paris 28 April 2014, I was convinced that North Dakota oil production will peak within 2014 using a correlation between oil production and shifted number of rigs, guessing the value of the shift and the relationship between rigs and production.

This April 2014 graph is wrong when adding present data at July 2014 (still rising after a minor peak in November 2013) and I have changed the shift from 20 months to 30 months and the correlation oil/rig, but I feel uncertain about the reliability of such graph.
When active in exploration I was used to drill 9 dry holes out of 10 wildcats: I am used to be wrong and I am not afraid of that. To make discovery you have to take risks.
My new model forecasts ND oil production peak in 2015 at less than 1.2 Mb/d, but again this new model could be wrong as the old one.

My modeling was based on the Montana oil peaks, which fit well with the number of rigs shifted by 12 months since 2000.

Read More

Texas RRC Report + More About Russia

08/19/201408/19/2014 Ron Patterson 136 Comments

The Texas RRC Oil and Gas Production Data is out with the June production numbers. I must repeat, as I do every month, that this data is much delayed and is and will be subject to updates every month, for about two years. Of course the latest months will be the ones which will be subject to the greatest revisions.

All oil data is in barrels per day. The last data point on all charts is June 2014.

I have six months of data here to give you some idea of the revisions that can be expected in the coming months. Texas crude only is still increasing. My guess is that it is increasing by about 40 thousand barrels per month.

Texas condensate declined for three months in June, July and August of 2013 but has now started to increase again. I estimate that Texas condensate is currently increasing but only some months. It looks like Texas condensate production in some months is declining but in other months is still increasing by as much as 4 to 6 thousand barrels per month.
Read More