Category: Uncategorized

Recent Production: Colombia, Mexico and Brazil

George Kaplan 214 Comments

A Guest Post by George Kaplan

Colombia

Colombia production is holding a plateau over the past year after a large decline in the last part of 2015 and first half of 2016. August value was 858 kbpd (down 0.04% y-o-y).

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Colombia oil reserves at the end of 2016 were 1.66 Gb (down 16.8% from 2 Gb in 2015 which followed a drop from 2.31 Gb in 2014). At the average 2016 production rate of 885 kbpd this gave an R/P of 5.1 years, the lowest for any significant producing country. Most of their production is heavy oil. Ecoptrol, which accounts for more than three quarters of Colombia’s crude and natural gas reserves and output, estimated about 45% of their decline was due to the “pronounced fall in oil prices”. Read More

OPEC September Oil Production

Ron Patterson 316 Comments

All data below is based on the latest OPEC Monthly Oil Market Report.

All data is through September 2017 and is in thousand barrels per day.

The above chart does not include the 14th member of OPEC that was recently added, Equatorial Guinea. I do not have historical data for Equatorial Guinea so I may not add them at all.  OPEC production has held steady for the past four months. Equatorial Guinea production is tiny, 141,000 bpd so their monthly change in production can be ignored without much effect. OPEC 14 production was up 88,000 barrels per day in September. But that was after their August production had been revised downward by 82,000 bpd.

The OPEC 13, (not including Equatorial Guinea), peaked in 2016 at 32,385 kbpd and are down 150 kbpd for the first 9 months of 2017. Please note that when I say “peaked” I mean “peaked so far“. I am well aware of the fact that OPEC, or some OPEC nations may have further peaks in the future.

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Call For Reviewers

D Coyne 192 Comments

A new book entitled

Mathematical GeoEnergy: Oil Discovery, Depletion and Renewable Energy Analysis     by Paul Pukite, Dennis Coyne, and Dan Challou

will be published late next year by Wiley as part of their AGU Book Series.

We are looking for potential reviewers of the manuscript. As the title implies, the contents are math intensive, and suitable for a college-level science or engineering curriculum. If interested, please send an email to peakoilbarrel@gmail.com . Read More

An Improved Empirical Model For Oil Prices

D Coyne 278 Comments

A Guest post by Ian Schindler (Schinzy)

This is an update to the post An Empirical Model For Oil Prices and Some Implications in which we discussed a model for oil prices as a function of 3 years of production, that is oil price in year t was estimated by production in year t, the discrete first derivative of production in year t, and the discrete second derivative in year t. We subsequently published a paper titled Oil Extraction, Economic Growth, and Oil Price Dynamics using the same model. This article contains most of our intuition on how peak oil will effect oil prices. We believe in fact that peak oil is about extraction prices rising faster than market prices and hence lower profitability for the oil industry.

Before going on, we note that all available data is very approximate. Jean Laherrère has exhaustively documented incoherence in extraction data from all standard sources [1]. We use a single price of oil provided by BP, but there is a large spectrum of prices for oil of different densities, chemistry, and provenance [2]. For this reason we do not search a perfect fit but rather try to understand the dynamics creating oil demand. Read More