The future of tight oil output in the US will depend in large part on future development of Permian Basin resources in Texas and New Mexico. I have developed nine scenarios for future Permian basin tight oil output based on 3 levels of technically recoverable resources (TRR) and 3 different future oil price scenarios. These are summarized in the chart below.
The global peak in oil and gas production for UK occurred in 1999 and 2000, probably delayed by four or five years by the Piper Alpha tragedy, and will not be approached, far less exceeded, again. There have been two other local peaks, each one preceded by about ten to twelve years by a local peak in the number of discoveries. The UK Oil and Gas Authority does not publish individual field resources, but it’s a fair bet that the large fields were discovered early on and most of the recent discoveries are small, near field tie-ins.
This update reports data from the Monthly Oil Market Report (MOMR) published by OPEC on December 14, 2020. The latest data point in each chart presented is November 2020 and output is thousands of barrels per day (kb/d).
OPEC output in October was revised 14 kb/d higher than reported in the October MOMR to 24,402 kb/d. November 2020 OPEC output increased by 707 kb/d to 25,109 kb/d.
Read MoreThis analysis concerns C&C only. Natural gas production is low and steadily declining with few deep gas-condensate discoveries and the shallow dry gas fields at end of life. I don’t know if lack of gas may affect oil production – e.g. insufficient: flow to allow stable pipeline operation; income to be economic to warrant continuing maintenance; or fuel gas or lift gas supply to surface facilities. Any such issues could influence shutdown timing and hence the possible stranding of assets.
The chart above shows a Verhulst fit to GoM C&C production using seven curves, three describing shallow production and two each for deep and ultra-deep. A symmetric logistic curve is convenient for manual curve fitting as it allows a linear extrapolation to give the ultimate recovery, but most production curves are not symmetrical – usually the decline is less concave with a thicker tail, especially as the production volume and number of independent producing entities are reduced. With Excel, using least-squares optimisation fitting to any curve(s) is simple and has the benefit of allowing additional constraints to be imposed for sensitivity checks (e.g. total area, equivalent to the ultimate recovery, and position or height of peak), so more general Verhulst curves allow closer fitting.
Read MoreAll OPEC data for this report is from the OPEC Monthly Oil Market Report. All data is through October 2020 and is in thousand barrels per day.
The combined production of all OPEC nations was up 322,000 barrels per day in October. However, that was after September production had been revised downward by 41,000 barrels per day.
Libya had the big gain in October.
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