Tag: Peak Oil

THE BLOOD BATH CONTINUES IN THE U.S. MAJOR OIL INDUSTRY

D Coyne 200 Comments

Guest Post by SRSrocco

This post does not necessarily reflect the views of Dennis Coyne or Ron Patterson.

The carnage continues in the U.S. major oil industry as they sink further and further in the RED. The top three U.S. oil companies, whose profits were once the envy of the energy sector, are now forced to borrow money to pay dividends or capital expenditures. The financial situation at ExxonMobil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips has become so dreadful, their total long-term debt surged 25% in just the past year.

Unfortunately, the majority of financial analysts at CNBC, Bloomberg or Fox Business have no clue just how bad the situation will become for the United States as its energy sector continues to disintegrate. While the Federal Government could step in and bail out BIG OIL with printed money, they cannot print barrels of oil.

Watch closely as the Thermodynamic Oil Collapse will start to pick up speed over the next five years.

According to the most recently released financial reports, the top three U.S. oil companies combined net income was the worst ever. The results can be seen in the chart below:

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Peak Oil and Plug-in Vehicles

D Coyne 220 Comments

Oil output (crude plus condensate or C+C) is likely to peak by 2020 (or may have peaked already in 2015 or 2016). Electric Vehicles (EVs) and Plugin hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) may allow about 40% of current oil consumption to be substituted with electricity, under the simplifying assumption that the use of oil based fuels in PHEVs is minimal due to high oil prices. It is assumed here that high oil prices are the likely result of the decline in oil output. I have modified my medium oil scenario with slightly higher extraction rates, shown in the chart below.

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OPEC December Production Data

Ron Patterson 266 Comments

The new January OPEC Monthly Oil Market Report is out with crude only production numbers for December 2016. All charts are in thousand barrels per day.

Indonesia has left OPEC so they are now down to 13 nations. The Indonesia historical data has been removed from the entire OPEC data. Therefore the December data does not reflect any drop due to Indonesia leaving OPEC.

OPEC 13

OPEC crude oil production dropped to 33,085,000 bpd in December. That was a drop of 220,900 bpd. However that was after the November production numbers were revised upward by 175,000 bpd. Therefore the drop was only 46,000 bpd from what was reported last month.

Officially, the OPEC agreed to cut production by 1.2 million barrels per day. Those cuts are supposed to kick in in January. But I would not count on their January production numbers being down that much.

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