The July OPEC Monthly Oil Market Report is out with all OPEC Crude Only production data for June 2015.
Crude Only production for the entire OPEC 12 as up 283,000 barrels per day in June to 31,378,000 bpd. But that was after May production had been revised up by 120,000 bpd. So counting May’s revisions and June’s numbers, OPEC production was up 403,000 bpd from what was originally reported last month.
The Eia has finally updated their International Energy Statistics with data through February 2015. All data in the charts below are Crude + Condensate and is in thousand barrels per day with the last data point February 2015.
World C+C dropped 477,000 bpd in January and another 65,000 bpd in February for a total decline of 542,000 bpd. World C+C stood at 79,160,000 barrels per day in February.
The EIA has updated their International Energy Statistics with annual production numbers through 2014 and export data through 2012. Sometimes these stats can be confusing as they include several types of production and exports. But for production I use only “Crude plus Condensate” and for exports I used “Crude Oil Exports” which I assume includes condensate as well.
Also the export data is not exact, just close, because some importers are also exporters. For instance in 2001 the US exported 59,000 barrels per day. In 2012 the US exported 629,000 barrels per day. The exporting of condensate is allowed in the US and since the Shale boom condensate exports have increased quite dramatically because Light Tight Oil is rather top heavy with condensate.
To get exports versus consumption for exporting nations I simply subtracted their exports from their production. The difference was what they consumed. Similar data can be found on the Energy Export Databrowser.
I think the data clearly endorses Jeffrey Brown’s Export Land Model.
In 2012 76,160,000 barrels of C+C were produced per day. Of that 76 million barrels 42,845,000 barrels were exported while the other 33,315,000 barrels was consumed by the producing nations. That is this is oil that was never exported.
What is Reserve Growth?
BP: In general, a portion of a field’s probable and possible reserves tend to get converted into proved reserves over time as operating history reduces the uncertainty around remaining recoverable reserves: an aspect of the phenomenon referred to as ‘reserves growth’.
Wiki: Experience shows that initial estimates of the size of newly discovered oil fields are usually too low. As years pass, successive estimates of the ultimate recovery of fields tend to increase. The term reserve growth refers to the typical increases in estimated ultimate recovery that occur as oil fields are developed and produced.
Basically the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission have stringent reserve booking requirements for oil companies. As a result early booked reserves of any given field is very conservative. Also, any company would much rather have reserves too low and increase them later than have them too high and have to decrease them later.
But would this not mean that fields of national oil companies, and especially fields that were discovered and developed in the Former Soviet Union have different reserve growth rates than fields developed by publically traded oil firms. The answer is yes and the USGS admits that is exactly the case.
In this publication, Reserve Growth in Oil Fields of West Siberian Basin, Russia, the USGS tells us all we need to know about Reserve growth in West Siberia.
ABSTRACT
Although reserve (or field) growth has proven to be an important factor contributing to new reserves in mature petroleum basins, it is still a poorly understood phenomenon. Although several papers have been published on the reserve growth in the U.S. fields, only limited studies are available on other petroleum provinces. This study explores the reserve growth in the 42 largest West Siberian oil fields that contain about 55 percent of the basin’s total oil reserves.
The West Siberian oil fields show a 13-fold reserve growth 20 years after the discovery year and only about a 2-fold growth after the first production year. This difference in growth is attributed to extensive exploration and field delineation activities between discovery and the first production year. Because of uncertainty in the length of evaluation time and in reported reserves during this initial period, reserve growth based on the first production year is more reliable for model development. However, reserve growth models based both on discovery year and first production year show rapid growth in the first few years and slower growth in the following years. In contrast, the reserve growth patterns for the conterminous United States and offshore Gulf of Mexico show a steady reserve increase throughout the productive lives of the fields. The different reserve booking requirements and the lack of capital investment for improved reservoir management and production technologies in West Siberian fields relative to U.S. fields are the probable causes for the difference in the growth patterns.
Four of the five largest fields in Russia are located here in West Siberia, Samotlor, Priob, Lyantor and Fedorov. 61% of Russian production currently comes from Western Siberia. Russia’s second largest field, Romashkino, discovered in 1948, is located in the Volga-Ural Basin and is also in serious decline.
Since around 2005 many countries have increased their oil production but more have decreased. But the combined production of the United States and Russia have kept the world on a slight uptrend since that time.
World oil production jumped in 2011, hardly moved at all in 2013 but it was up by more than 1.5 million barrels per day in 2014. And after such a huge gain everyone and their brother were singing “peak oil is dead’. But if you scroll down through the 37 major world oil producers it becomes obvious that a majority of nations have peaked and most of them are in steep decline.
The above chart is EIA data however the next four charts below are JODI data with the last data point February 2015. The data on all charts is thousand barrels per day.