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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 C 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 C 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

OPEC August Crude Oil Production

Ron Patterson 155 Comments

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

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

The above chart does not include the 14th member of OPEC that was just 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 three months. Their production was down 79,000 barrels per day in August but that is not a big drop when production is over 32.5 million barrels per day.

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