Tag: Gulf of Mexico

GoM Production, 2017 Summary

George Kaplan 168 Comments

A Guest Post by George Kaplan

2017 was the highest producing year for oil in the GoM and included the record month in March. Gas, which has tended to come from shallow water wells, had accelerated decline. The production would have been higher but for some disruptions from Hurricanes, in particular Nate, though that had the least impact onshore, and some unplanned outages in November and December due to equipment failures. The failure to Delta House subsea manifold affected Rigel, Otis and Son of Bluto 2 fields, and the first two still appear to be off-line while Son of Bluto 2 resumed production in December (LLOG, the operator, I think calls the Rigel field Neidermeyer, which is much better for the Animal House theme). The Enchilada gas pipeline appears to have ruptured at the main platform and has resulted in Baldpate, Salsa, Llano, Cardamom and Magnolia going off-line. Plans were recently announced to restart Baldpate/Salsa, which do not go through the platform, but I haven’t seen any notice of the restart.

 

Oil Average

Oil Exit Rate

Gas Average

Gas Exit Rate

Total Average

Total Exit Rate
  (kbpd) (kbpd) (mmscfd) (mmscfd) (kboed) (kboed)

2016

 1600 1728 3308 3363 2151 2289

2017

 1685 1570 2955 2381 2177 1967

Change

 85 -158 -354 -982 26 -322

Ratio

 5.3% -9.1% -10.7% -29.2% 1.2% -14.1%

C&C Production

December production numbers were dominated by the unplanned outages, so comparisons with November don’t mean much. As well as the two issues given above the Tahiti and Caesar/Tonga fields were off line for a few weeks, though I have seen no news why (these share a common set of leases but are produced separately to the Tahiti and Constitution platforms). Each month that these are three issues hold current outages would knock about 10 to 12 kbpd off the achievable average production for 2018.

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Despite recent variability it certainly looks like the new fields brought on since late 2013, and which have seen all the net growth since then, have peaked. Any average decline rate can’t really be extrapolated yet, given the recent upsets, but the BOEM reserve estimate updates, due in the next couple of months, will provide better R/P numbers as there will be longer operating data for all the fields.

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GoM C&C Production: November Update

George Kaplan 103 Comments

A Guest Post by George Kaplan

EIA Reserves

EIA provides estimates of proved reserves based on information from the E&Ps on form EIA-23 for crude only, and also shows the categories for changes (discoveries, production, revisions etc.). This data with updates for 2016 has been due since November but so far has been twice delayed. BOEM make their own estimates for 2P (i.e. proved and probable) based on strict adherence to SEC/SPE rules (i.e. the reserve must be on production or be expected to be produced within five years). I think this usually comes out in May. In the absence of the latest EIA numbers I’ve presented the 2015 numbers with adjustments for subsequent production. There will be revisions and additional discoveries to include once the actual data is available though I think fairly small, especially for gas, but it will be interesting to see.

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Despite excluding probable reserves and counting crude only, the EIA estimates have recently exceeded those from BOEM. It looks like a lot of the probable reserves were converted to proved through positive revisions in the period 2008 to 2011; i.e. possibly due to some price increases then, but also immediately following the SEC rule changes to exclude reserves without firm development plans, which may or may not be coincidental: the E&Ps may be less strict on applying the SEC/SPE rule, which they are allowed to do for large, long term projects. The BOEM estimates are pretty much flat over recent years as additions (which then become backdated “discoveries”) from new projects going through FID balance production, whereas EIA estimates are declining with revisions recently zero to negative.
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GoM July Production Update

George Kaplan 263 Comments

A Guest Post by George Kaplan

GoM C&C production for July by BOEM was 1746 kbpd and by EIA 1761, compared with, respectively, 1631 and 1634 kbpd (corrected) in June. The EIA number is a new peak, the BOEM one is still 24 kbpd short of their March numbers. The growth was from Thunder Horse (partially), Constitution and Baldpate/Salsa (which is mostly gas) coming back on-line, plus continued ramp-up in Stones and Marmalard.

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C&C Production Details

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GoM June Production Update

George Kaplan 93 Comments

A Guest Post by George Kaplan

Production

Production for June by BOEM was 1631 kbpd and by EIA 1636, compared with 1673 and 1659 kbpd, respectively, in May. The decline was mostly from Thunder Horse going offline and Constitution staying offline. Hurricane Cindy didn’t seem to have much of an impact, things will be different for the impact of Harvey on August figures.

Even with the two offline facilities coming back July numbers will struggle to beat those for March, and after that the depletion declines and hurricane disruptions take over. Note that the “others” area includes any assumptions BOEM has made to allow for missing data, which is quite a lot this month.

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