Eagle Ford – Page 17 – Peak Oil Barrel

Texas RRC October Oil & Gas Report

12/18/201412/18/2014 Ron Patterson 350 Comments

The Texas Railroad Comission has updated their Oil & Gas Production Data Query to include the production numbers for October. The Texas data is always incomplete so the charts all look like there is a big decline in the last few months. This is not the case, the charts only reflect the data that has been received and the production numbers will look a lot more positive after several months.

That being said there is something that can be gleaned from these numbers. Even though the data is incomplete, if production is increasing then last months incomplete numbers should be higher than this months incomplete numbers. Using that logic, there seems to have been a strong slowdown in Texas oil and gas production.

All the last data points are October and is in barrels per day.

In June and July there was a strong increase in production reported to the Tesas RRC by the oil companies. But in August, September and October things slowed down considerably.

Texas condensate production has slowed down a lot more than crude. Most Texas condensate comes from their natural gas wells but there are a some wells in the Eagle Ford that produces mostly just condensate.
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Bakken and North Dakota Production Report

12/12/201412/12/2014 Ron Patterson 441 Comments

The North Dakota Industrial Commission just published their Bakken Monthly Oil Production Statistics and also their ND Monthly Oil Production Statistics.

Bakken production was down 1,598 barrels per day to 1,118,010 bpd. All North Dakota production was down 4,054 bpd to 1,182,174 bpd.

From the Director’s Cut, bold mine:

The drilling rig count dropped 2 from September to October, an additional 3 from October to November, and has since fallen 5 more from November to today. The number of well completions decreased from 193(final) in September to 134(preliminary) in October. Three significant forces are driving the slow-down: oil price, flaring reduction, and oil conditioning. Several operators have reported postponing completion work to achieve the NDIC gas capture goals. There were no major precipitation events, but there were 9 days with wind speeds in excess of 35 mph (too high for completion work).

The drillers outpaced completion crews in October. At the end of October there were about 650 wells waiting on completion services, an increase of 40.

Crude oil take away capacity is expected to remain adequate as long as rail deliveries to coastal refineries keep growing.

Rig count in the Williston Basin is set to fall rapidly during the first quarter of 2015. Utilization rate for rigs capable of 20,000+ feet is currently about 90%, and for shallow well rigs (7,000 feet or less) about 60%.

Sep rig count 193
Oct rig count 191
Nov rig count 188
Today’s rig count is 183

Sep Sweet Crude Price = $74.85/barrel
Oct Sweet Crude Price = $68.94/barrel
Nov Sweet Crude Price = $60.61/barrel
Today Sweet Crude Price = $41.75/barrel (lowest since March 2009)

I just checked Rig Count. It now stands at 181 but one of them is drilling a salt water disposal well. So they have 180 rigs drilling for oil right now.

Bakken wells producing increased by 118 to 8,602 while North Dakota wells producing increased by 92 to 11,507. Since Bakken wells are included in the North Dakota count this means at least 26 wells outside the Bakken had to be shut down.
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Did Peak Oil Arrive in 2014?

11/30/201411/30/2014 Ron Patterson 495 Comments

The recent price crash in crude oil, if it lasts for any length of time, will certainly affect oil production. The question is, just how great an effect will it have an how soon? But in this post I want to concentrate on what is, or was, happening to world oil production even before the price crash.

Russia, the largest producer of crude oil in the world, will peak in 2014. There are various estimates of how fast their production will decline but best case, for Russia, puts their decline at about 2% per year. They say they are depending on the Bazhenov Shale and Arctic offshore just to keep production flat in 2015. Well that is not going to happen, not in the next few years anyway. And if prices stay in the current range it is unlikely to ever happen.

OPEC is a wild card but there is little doubt that they are producing flat out right now. Only Iran has any real any real chance of increasing production very much and that only if sanctions are lifted. Libya has already increased production significantly and could increase more but very little. With the violence still going on in Libya, there is a greater chance that their production will decline.

But before we go any further let’s look at what the EIA is predicting for 2015 for both the USA and the rest of non-OPEC? The below charts are from the EIA’s Short-Term Energy Outlook. Current data is through October 2014 and the projected data is through December 2015. All data is in million barrels per day. Also, very important, the data is Total Liquids which includes NGLs, bio fuels and refinery process gain. The EIA, for US production even counts refinery process gain on imported oil.

The EIA is predicting US average production total liquids will be up 1.49 million barrels per day in 2014 and up another 1.1 mbd in 2015. (I always use m for million and k for thousand.)

The EIA is predicting non-OPEC average total liquids will be up will be up 1.88 mbd in 2014 but only about half that, up .95 mbd, in 2015.

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AEO 2015 Preliminary Report

10/30/201410/30/2014 Ron Patterson 311 Comments

The EIA published, last month, AEO2015 Preliminary Oil & Natural Gas
Production & Price Results. And just below the title they wrote:
DRAFT – DO NOT CITE
But I am not citing anything, just informing you of what they said. 😉 What they mean however is that they reserve the right to change their mind before the report comes out early net year. And I can certainly understand that. All Oil data is in million barrels per day.

They have lower 48 production hitting a slowly increasing plateau in 2016 and peaking at just under 8.4 million barrels per day in 2027.

They have US Tight Oil production following pretty much the same profile, hitting a plateau in 2016 at about 5.5 million barrels per day and holding flat until starting a very slow decline in 2030.

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Post Carbon Institute’s LTO Reality Check

10/27/201410/28/2014 Ron Patterson 272 Comments

The Post Carbon Institute has just released a critique of the EIA’s Light Tight Oil projections. It is titled DRILLING DEEPER. The report is highly critical of the EIA’s projections and should be read by everyone interested in Peak Oil.

All data on all charts is in million barrels per day unless otherwise specified.

First a look at the EIA oil projections for US production from all sources. They expect offshore to increase to 2 million barrels per day by 2016, an increase of almost 600,000 bpd from current production. Also note that the EIA has US almost peaking in 2016 and increasing only slightly until the peak in 2019.

The EIA has several projections, covering all bases. However the reference, or most likely, will be the only one covered in this post.
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