Tag: Peak Oil

Bakken Summary

George Kaplan 256 Comments
A guest post by George Kaplan

The North Dakota area of the Bakken LTO basin has accessible data from the ND Department of Natural Resources, Oil and Gas Division. Production here seems to be past peak and in general decline. The data presented here is therefore more a historical perspective than of much interest in predicting issues that may have significant impact for the future. However it may give some indication on what to expect in the Permian basins, the only ones left in the US that may have capacity to increase production. The Texas RRC does also produce good data but a global data dump produces files that are too big for my computer to handle and splitting into smaller subsets is too man-hour intensive for me to pursue.

Production Across the Area

These charts show how the oil production has changed every three years by range (almost equivalent to lines of longitudes) and township lines (latitudes). These lines run every six miles and the area they contain is called a township, consisting of 36 square mile sections (that’s the simplified explanation, earth’s curvature and irregular land features make things a bit more complicated). 

Read More

Annual Reserve Revisions Part V: Oil Sands

George Kaplan 207 Comments
A guest post by George Kaplan

Over this century the oil sands business has consolidated into three main players: CNRL, Suncor and Cenovus, all of which have shown considerable organic and total growth in reserves and production (and presumably debt). After this growth period it looks like things are plateauing at the moment. Oil sands projects have longer life cycles than conventional (e.g. 50 versus 20) and hence slower decline and depletion rates and longer plateaus. Most of the other companies have pulled out in the last five years, Shell has downsized and ExxonMobil’s assets are susceptible to price swings and it has put new developments on hold

Husky was a fourth Canadian company with significant interests, though less than the others, but the data and some news stories don’t show it to have been a particularly well-run company and it was taken over by Cenovus last year.

Canadian companies present annual data on SEC form 40-f (and a Canadian equivalent) and it is extremely detailed, in particular it is the only remaining readily accessible source for a Company’s probable reserve data that I know of. All SEC filings can be difficult to follow before 2009, especially Canadian ones as Bitumen mining could not be listed as part of oil and gas operations, in-situ SAGD could, but companies chose to list the product either grouped in with heavy oil or as separate entities (raw bitumen or synthetic oil). As further examples NGL was originally listed separately then it wasn’t and then it was again; reserves were listed as net only then net and gross and then gross alone and the layout of the forms changed every year until 2011.

Cenovus

Cenovus was created in 2009 when it was split off from Encana taking the oil assets, while the gas business remained with the original company, which has since been renamed Ovintiv. I couldn’t find data for 2006 but it is probably somewhere in the Ovintiv filings. It grew significantly in 2017 when it acquired ConocoPhillips’ assets in Western Canada. It is now exclusively an Oil Sands company. Its debt load must be quite high.

The oil sands replacement ratio has plummeted in the last decade but may be stabilizing at around 100%.

Read More

Annual Reserve Revisions Part IV: Shale Producers

George Kaplan 207 Comments
A guest post by George Kaplan

EIA Liquids Reserve Estimates

This follows on from Part I, which looked at EIA reserves and revision estimates for US as a whole and the GoM, and concentrates on the on-shore tight oil and (below)gas producing regions.

The EIA issues revision data by whole states or state districts rather than by basin, so some of the reserves and production, but a small proportion, will be from conventional reservoirs. It does give total reserves for each shale basin but not the changes, and I didn’t go to the trouble of pro-rating everything against that. Its data only goes through 2019; the 2020 update will be out in December or January.

The regions for each basins used are Permian – Texas Districts 7C, 8 and 8A and East New Mexico; Bakken –  North Dakota and Montana; Eagle Ford – Texas Districts 1, 2, 3 and 4 Onshore; Niobara –  Colorado; Marcelus – Pennsylvania and West Virginia; Utica –  Ohio; Haynesville – Louisiana South Onshore and Texas District 6; Barnett – Texas Districts 5, 7B and 9; Woodford – Oklahoma ; Fayetteville – Arkansas.

Read More

February Non-OPEC Oil Production Sinks

Ovi 269 Comments

A post by Ovi at peakoilbarrel.

Below are a number of oil (C + C ) production charts for Non-OPEC countries created from data provided by the EIAʼs International Energy Statistics and updated to February 2021. Information from other sources such as OPEC, the STEO and country specific sites such as Russia, Norway and China is used to provide a short term outlook for future output and direction for a few countries and the world.

Read More