Norway Summary

A Guest Post by George Kaplan

Exploration, Discoveries and Development

Drilling and development activity off shore Norway has been fairly steady through the life of the basin. This has been partly from government policy, through tax relief or direct action, but also through opening up of new areas as technology becomes available. It has moved from mainly producing oil to now being dominated by gas, although there is little direct gas exploration now (note that converting gas to o.e. is simple in S.I. units and is just a factor of 1000).

Drilling activity has been high in the 2000’s for development wells (including a lot of in fill drilling and some major redevelopments) and exploration (I think there is very favourable tax arrangements that encourage drilling in even fairly low prospective areas). Appraisal drilling has been more flat and there has been some reports that some discoveries have proved disappointing after start up, possibly because of insufficient drilling before development was approved.

There are twelve projects “approved for production” (i.e. in development) with average reserves of 26.5 MSm3 and average discovery year 2001; nineteen projects “production in clarification phase” (i.e. in FEED or pre-FEED) with average resources of 25 MSm3 and average discovery year also 2001; twenty nine projects “production likely but unclarified” (i.e. in conceptual design) with average resources of 10 MSm3 and average discovery year also 2003; and twenty eight projects “production not evaluated” with resources of 8.5 MSm3 and average discovery year also 2010.

The number of “hydrocarbon shows” has been large recently but they have mostly been small with “production unlikely” or “not yet evaluated” (and present prices mean most of these are likely to be deferred at best).

The number of development projects per year has, if anything, been increasing slightly, although the size has been generally decreasing. The number of shut down fields is increasing slowly but the have been a number that have had their life times extended beyond their original shut-down date (through improved reservoir performance and/or major redevelopments).

The oil price may have influenced activity but I can’t really see it much, maybe the effect of the current crash will be more obvious.

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Are Non-OPEC’s Best Days in the Rear-view Mirror

A post by Ovi at peakoilbarrel.

While this post updates Non-OPEC production to January 2020, we are now in late May and the direction for future production for the next few years is clear, LOWER than where it was in March 2020. OPEC, in response to the reduced worldwide demand, arranged for a production reduction through a Declaration of Cooperation (DoC) with OPEC and Non-OPEC countries. Also Canada and Norway have indicated they will be cutting production in response to world wide reduced demand. The OPEC + DoC reduction schedule and chart are shown and discussed at the end of this post.

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World Oil Production, February 2019 Data.

The data for the charts below are from the EIA’s Monthly Energy Review. I will update this post Friday, May 31st with March data for the USA and charts for several states when the EIA’s Petroleum Supply Monthly is published. All data is through February 2019 and is thousand barrels per day.

World C+C production was down only slightly in February, dropping only 87,000 barrels per day to 82,389,000 bpd.

It is my contention that World, less USA peaked in November 2016 with the 12 month average peaking in 2017.

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The EIA’s Optimistic Outlook

Most of the data below is taken from from the EIA’s Short-Term Energy Outlook. The data through February, 2019 is the EIA’s best estimate of past production and all data from March 2019 through December 2020 is the EIA’s best estimate of future production. However in most cases February production is highly speculative so I drew the “projection” line between January and February.

Understand the above chart is Total Liquids, not C+C as I usually post. As you can see the EIA expects world petroleum liquids to keep climbing ever upwards.

This is the EIA’s data for OPEC all liquids with Production data from April 2019 through December 2020.

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