OPEC Update also Moscow Confirms Russian Oil Production in Decline

OPEC has just published their latest Monthly Oil Market Report with the June production numbers. All data is in thousand barrels per day and is Crude Only.OPEC 12

All revisions in the May data were minor. The June OPEC Crude Only production was down 80,000 bp/d from May.

Iraq

The big story in June was the invasion or Iraq. It has has only minor effect on production. Iraqi production was down 169,000 bp/d in June.

Saudi Arabia

OPEC’s largest produce and the World’s largest exporter, Saudi Arabia, increased Crude production by 48,000 bp/d in June. There has been very little change in Saudi production in the last nine months.

All other OPEC producers had very little change from May to June. Charts of all 12 OPEC nations can be found on the OPEC Charts page.

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JODI, the EIA and Their Data

There has been very little new data to report lately. The JODI, Joint Organizations Data Initiative, data for March came out a few days ago. JODI is very good as far as the data it reports goes. The problem is there is a lot of data they just don’t report. If a country does not report their production for a given month then JODI just leaves it blank. And some countries they can’t seem to get any data from, so JODI just gives them zero for every month. For those countries I just substitute EIA numbers.

As far as OPEC goes JODI is very political, reporting the inflated numbers that Iran and Venezuela report. I use instead the EIA data for those two countries.  Anyway here is what I have from JODI. The Data is in kb/d, last data point March 2014:

JODI World Total

But for a few countries JODI is a pretty good data source. Russia is a good example.

JODI Russia

JODI has Russia peaking, so far, in November at 10,127 kb/d and now about 100 kb/d below that point. Analysis have, for years, been expecting Russian production to decline but new fields in Siberia have kept inching up a little bit each year. But with over 60% of their production still coming from Western Siberia’s giant, largely depleted, fields it looks like that long overdue decline may have finally arrived.
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Proven Reserves, IOCs and Other News

Not much new data to report this past week but I did try to hammer out a few things of interest. The EIA released their Crude Oil Production report for the US and individual states with data through February 2014. I combined Montana and North Dakota to show their production.

Mont+NDTheir combined production was 1,027 kb/d. This is still below their production of 1,055 kb/d in November. This is more than just the Bakken as both Montana and North Dakota have production outside the Bakken.

GOM ProductionPart of the EIA’s plan for 9.6 mb/d of C+C by 2016 has The Gulf of Mexico going to 2 million bp/d by 2016. The GOM does not appear go be going anywhere however. There are new fields coming on line but they are just barely keeping up with those very high decline rates of the deep water fields. The Gulf of Mexico has her very own Red Queen.
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EIA’s International Energy Statistics Updated

The EIA has finally updated their International Energy Statistics. They were a month behind so they caught up by updating two months of data. The last update had data through October. This update has the data through December 2013. They also updated their annual data page.

If you click on the link, then mouse over “Petroleum, Production” and click, you will get “Total Oil Supply”. That data is everything including ethanol, biodiesel, NGLs and even refinery process gain. I never use that data. After that page comes I go to the box labeled “Total Oil Supply” then click on the down arrow, then click on “Crude Oil including Lease Condensate” That is the data I use, that is all I use.

World Yearly

From the annual data I found total World C+C was up a mere 167 kb/d. US production was up 967 kb/d. That means that the World less USA was down 800 kb/d.

I have been following Russia pretty close on their website CDU TEK.

Russia CDU TEK

The data through December is from the EIA. The last four months, through April, I gleaned from the Russian website. Their data is daily in tons per day. I had to convert it and average it into monthly data but it is pretty close. Also, because the data on the above chart is non-zero based the increase appears greater than it really is. The increase averages out to be about one hundred thousand barrels per year.

I don’t know what the anomaly was in November. The JODI data does not show that but actually shows a peak in November 2013 above December.

Everyone has been expecting Russia to peak for several years. But their production has just kept inching up a little each year. This report is from five years ago: Alex Burgansky: Russian Oil and Gas Industry Surprises Analysts. Requires registration.

There are plenty of projects in Russia, both, new projects and existing brownfield projects. Russia is a very mature producer. If you exclude all the drilling activity taking place every year, then Russian organic decline in production is close to 19%. To compensate for that organic decline, Russia drills somewhere between 5,000 and 6,000 wells every year.

 This year, as I said before, some people expected production to collapse. We certainly never thought it would collapse, but we did think it would decline. Instead it’s actually growing as a result of benefits from past investments in the new fields coming on stream this year. But we’re simply running out of the pipeline of these new fields. Therefore, next year there will be a lot fewer fields coming on stream; in the absence of new incentives to put more money to work to grow Russian oil production, it will naturally start declining, with organic decline rates of around 19% and growing.

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