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The surplus energy that powers the world is declining

Every week in our Off The Cuff Series, we interview expert minds on the premium side of PeakProsperity.com. These discussions are unscripted and informal, where my partner Chris Martenson and his guest react to recent macro developments and predict the likeliest repercussions.

Every once in while, when we have an exceptionally timely conversation, we’ll make it available to the public. And we’re doing that this week.

Chris caught petroleum geologist Art Berman right before he went on stage to deliver a presentation on the limitations of shale oil (his excellent slides can be found here). The world is finally starting to realize that the profit-making potential of this space was drastically over-hyped.

But more important, warns Art, is that the souring sentiment on shale oil is a reflection on the bigger challenge ahead of us: How we will power the world in a future of declining net energy?

When we reflect upon the material progress of humankind over the hundred and fifty years, it seems very clear to me that much, if not most, of it happened because humankind moved basically from wood to coal to oil/natural gas. To increasingly more dense sources of energy.
And the result is that we get a whole lot more work out of whatever energy we expend. Less and less of that is done by manual labor.
Everything works to live. Look at the African savanna: it’s all about energy. The animals spend all day long getting food one way or another. That’s the way life on earth works.
But not so much for us, because we’re fortunate — we humans have all this fossil energy at our disposal. You and I can sit and chat on Skype here without having to do very much.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Bakken Hit A New Record In 2018, But It’s A Bad Sign For The Industry

March 5, 2019

The Bakken Hit A New Record In 2018, But It’s A Bad Sign For The Industry

The insanity continues in the United States second largest shale oil field as the fundamental economics go from bad to worse. While it is true that the shale industry doesn’t look as dire as it did back in 2016 when oil prices fell off a cliff, I can assure you the worst is yet to come. Unfortunately, the market is blind to the biggest Ponzi Scheme in history, because wisdom and reason have disappeared from the energy industry years ago.

How can I say that? Well, I heard it from several oilmen that worked in the conventional oil industry… an industry that made good money, paid its bills, and didn’t go much into debt. They told me that the only way shale oil could work is if the company went public so it could raise money from some poor unworthy slobs they didn’t know in order to fund an uneconomic business model. These oilmen told me none of them would be crazy or stupid enough to go into the shale oil business. As veteran oil analyst Art Berman stated, “Why on earth would anyone want to invest in shale to at best, breakeven?”

So, the shale oil saga continues as the blind lead the blind. I know this because I have been fortunate enough to speak with someone in the shale industry and I continue to receive updates on just how bad the situation is unfolding. Sounds crazy, but there are a few very smart and clever people that know the disaster taking place in the shale industry, but not many.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

U.S. SHALE OIL INDUSTRY: Not In The Business To Make Money, But To Take Money

January 21, 2019

U.S. SHALE OIL INDUSTRY: Not In The Business To Make Money, But To Take Money

The U.S. Shale Oil Industry has been a financial trainwreck since day one. And, with nearly $300 billion in public and private debt racked up by the shale industry since its inception, that hasn’t stopped investors from throwing good money after bad to continue the biggest energy Ponzi scheme in history.

Unfortunately, the worst is still yet to come because the industry hasn’t provided the market with analysis on what happens to the shale oil companies and investors holding their debt when production finally peaks forever. I don’t believe the market has any idea just how quickly and violently the U.S. Shale Oil Industry could implode. Get ready for the Sun to Set on the U.S. Shale Oil Industry.

Veteran oil analyst, Art Berman, mentioned in his interview on Peak Prosperity that he believes the oil industry “IS DONE.” He also explains why the U.S. Shale Industry is not in the business of making money, but rather, taking money. I highly recommend “ALL,” my followers to listen to the interview below as it confirms the dire energy predicament we face:

In my last video update, DOW, GOLD & SILVER: Markets Disconnect In 2019, I explained the following image below which is a typical shale well completion layout and the tremendous amount of equipment needed to frac and produce shale oil and gas. What we need to understand about shale industry is that it consumes so much more energy (capex, equipment & labor) to produce oil, there is less available net energy to provide real economic growth. Furthermore, a larger segment of the economy is driven by the enormous amount of shale energy activity that when it falls back into a recession-depression, it will have a much more negative impact on the U.S. economy.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Art Berman: Exposing The False Promise Of Shale Oil

January 16, 2019

Art Berman: Exposing The False Promise Of Shale Oil

Estimates of recoverable oil are proving wildly wrong

Because the US is pinning huge hopes on its shale oil “revolution”, so much depends on that story being right. Here’s the narrative right now:

The US, is the new Saudi Arabia
It’s the swing producer when it comes to influencing the price of oil
The US will be able to increase oil production for decades to come
New technology is unlocking more oil shale supply all the time

But what if there’s evidence that runs counter to all of that?

We’re going to be taking a little victory lap on this week’s podcast because The Wall Street Journal has finally admitted that shale oil wells are not producing as much as the companies operating them touted they would produce — which is what we’ve been saying for years here at PeakProsperity.com, largely because we closely follow Art’s work:

The Wall Street Journal did some research and they got the general point that the wells are not as good as advertised.

But what they missed is just how much farther off many of these reserves are than even the discounted reserves that they’ve reported.

Bottom line: if the understatement is only 10%, that’s a rounding error and it’s not that much of an issue to the average person. But I’ve been trying for a decade to get the number that I independently develop to get anywhere close to the published numbers. In most cases, I can only get near 60% or 70% of them. So, the gap, I think is much more substantial.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Shale Oil Revolution Actually Reflects a Nation in Decline

January 12, 2019

Shutterstock

The Shale Oil Revolution Actually Reflects a Nation in Decline

Faster consumption + no strategy = diminished prospects

Here in the opening month of 2019, as the US consumes itself with hot debate over a border wall, far more important topics are being ignored completely.

Take US energy policy. In the US press and political circles, there’s nothing but crickets sounding when it comes to serious analysis or any sort of sustainable long-term plan.

Once you understand the role of energy in everything, you can begin to appreciate why there’s simply nothing more important to get right.

Energy is at the root of everything. If you have sufficient energy, anything is possible. But without it, everything grinds to a halt.

For several decades now the US has been getting its energy policy very badly wrong. It’s so short-sighted, and rely so heavily on techno-optimism, that it barely deserves to be called a ‘policy’ at all.

Which is why we predict that in the not-too-distant future, this failure to plan will attack like a hungry wolfpack to bite down hard on the US economy’s hamstrings and drag it to the ground.

Shale Oil Snafu

America’s energy policy blunders are nowhere more obvious than in the shale oil space, where it’s finally dawning on folks that these wells are going to produce a lot less than advertised.

Vindicating our own reports — which drew from the excellent work of Art Berman, David Hughes and Enno Peters’ excellent website — the WSJ finally ran the numbers and discovered that shale wells are not producing nearly as much oil as the operators had claimed they were going to produce:

Fracking’s Secret Problem—Oil Wells Aren’t Producing as Much as Forecast

Jan 2, 2019

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Shale Won’t Trigger The Next Financial Crisis

September 6, 2018

Shale Won’t Trigger The Next Financial Crisis

Many think that debt and negative cash flow by U.S. shale companies will crash the global financial system. I believe the opposite is more likely, that a developing financial crisis may crash oil prices and test the survival of shale plays.

In The Next Financial Crisis Lurks Underground, Bethany McLean argues that the U.S. energy boom is on shaky ground because of excessive debt and failure to show profits after a decade of drilling. This thoughtful op-ed raises concerns that many have expressed since the advent of tight oil production.

The problem with her thesis is that debt from the U.S. oil sector is just not big enough to crash the global financial system. Losses and bankruptcies in that sector in 2015-16 were substantial and yet, did not threaten the stability of world financial markets. In the improbable worst case scenario, the U.S. government would step in as it did for the auto industry in 2009.

Higher oil prices are inevitable at some time sooner than later because of under-investment over the last several years of low prices. This is compounded by lack of big discoveries and ever-present geopolitical supply interruptions and outages.

Ms. McClean correctly identifies the link between near-zero interest rates and the rise of tight oil financing. She fails, however, to acknowledge the 2004-2008 plateau of world production at the same time that demand from China greatly increased. This pushed oil prices to more than $100/barrel–the main factor that made tight oil development feasible. Because that price trend continued for 4 years, supply overshoot led to the oil-price collapse of late 2014.

The two price cycles since then are shown in Figure 1 as a cross plot of oil price vs comparative inventory (current oil + product stock levels minus the 5-year average of those stock levels).

(Click to enlarge)

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall

June 16, 2018

A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall

The prospects for the rest of the year are awful

Après moi, le déluge

~ King Louis XV of France

A hard rain’s a-gonna fall

~ Bob Dylan (the first)

As the Federal Reserve kicked off its second round of quantitative easing in the aftermath of the Great Financial Crisis, hedge fund manager David Tepper predicted that nearly all assets would rise tremendously in response.

“The Fed just announced: We want economic growth, and we don’t care if there’s inflation… have they ever said that before?”

He then famously uttered the line “You gotta love a put”, referring to the Fed’s declared willingness to print $trillions to backstop the economy and financial makets.

Nine years later we see that Tepper was right, likely even more so than he realized at the time.

The other world central banks followed the Fed’s lead. Mario Draghi of the ECB declared a similar “whatever it takes” policy and has printed nearly $3.5 trillion in just the past three years alone. The Bank of Japan has intervened so much that it now owns over 40% of its country’s entire bond market. And no central bank has printed more than the People’s Bank of China.

It has been an unprecedented forcefeeding of stimulus into the global system. And, contrary to what most people realize, it hasn’t diminished over the years since the Great Recession. In fact, the most recent wave from 2015-2018 has seen the highest amount of injected ‘thin-air’ money ever:

Total Assets Of Majro Central Banks

In response, equities have long since rocketed past their pre-crisis highs, bonds continued rising as interest rates stayed at historic lows, and many real estate markets are now back in bubble territory. As Tepper predicted, financial and other risk assets have shot the moon.

And everyone learned to love the ‘Fed put’ and stop worrying.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Art Berman: Think Oil Is Getting Expensive? You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet.

June 2, 2018

Art Berman: Think Oil Is Getting Expensive? You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet.

A global supply crunch approaches…

After issuing clear warnings on this program that sub-$50 oil prices were going to be short-lived, oil expert and geological consultant Art Berman returns to the podcast this week to explain why today’s $70 oil prices will go higher — likely much higher — and start materially contricting world economic growth.

Art explains how the current glut of oil created by the US shale boom — along with high crude output by both OPEC and non-OPEC producers — is a temporary anomaly. Fundamentally, we are not finding nearly as much oil as we need to continue the trajectory of the global demand curve. And at the same time, we’re extracting our reserves at a faster rate than ever. That’s a mathematical recipe for a coming supply crunch — it’s not a matter of if, but when:

The price of oil has gone up 30%+ percent just here in the last year alone. There are some very good reasons for that.

In the United States, we’ve been drawing down our reserves, our inventory and the amount of oil we have in storage, consistently since February of 2017. We’re going into the 15th month of drawing from storage each week because we’re not producing enough to meet the need.

To those paying attention: the United States is right now producing more oil than it ever has in its history. We are a million barrels a day higher than the peak in 1970 — the one that King Hubbert got in trouble for warning about. We’re higher by 50,000 or so barrels per month of production. Yet, here we are, still sucking oil out of storage. What does that tell you? There is only one way to interpret that: We are using more than we are producing.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Party On, Dudes

February 9, 2018

Party On, Dudes

As of this week, the shale oil miracle launched US oil production above the 1970 previous-all-time record at just over ten million barrels a day. Techno-rapturists are celebrating what seems to be a blindingly bright new golden age of energy greatness. Independent oil analyst Art Berman, who made the podcast rounds the last two weeks, put it in more reality-accessible terms: “Shale is a retirement party for the oil industry.”

It was an impressive stunt and it had everything to do with the reality-optional world of bizarro finance that emerged from the wreckage of the 2008 Great Financial Crisis. In fact, a look the chart below shows how exactly the rise of shale oil production took off after that milestone year of the long emergency. Around that time, US oil production had sunk below five million barrels a day, and since we were burning through around twenty million barrels a day, the rest had to be imported.

Chart by Steve St. Angelo at www.srsroccoreport.com

In June of 2008, US crude hit $144-a-barrel, a figure so harsh that it crippled economic activity — since just about everything we do depends on oil for making, enabling, and transporting stuff. The price and supply of oil became so problematic after the year 2000 that the US had to desperately engineer a work-around to keep this hyper-complex society operating. The “solution” was debt. If you can’t afford to run your society, then try borrowing from the future to keep your mojo working.

The shale oil industry was a prime beneficiary of this new hyper-debt regime. The orgy of borrowing was primed by Federal Reserve “creation” of trillions of dollars of “capital” out of thin air (QE: Quantitative Easing), along with supernaturally low interest rates on the borrowed money (ZIRP: Zero Interest Rate Policy). T

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Art Berman: Like It Or Not, The Future Remains All About Oil

January 24, 2018

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Art Berman: Like It Or Not, The Future Remains All About Oil

And competition for it is heating up

Art Berman, 40-year veteran in the petroleum production industry and respected geological consultant, returns to the podcast this week to talk about oil.

After the price of oil fell from its previous $100+/bbl highs to under $30/bbl in 2015, many declared dead the concerns raised by peak oil theorists. Headlines selling the “shale miracle” have sought to convince us that the US will one day eclipse Saudi Arabia in oil production. In short: cheap, plentiful oil is here to stay.

How likely is this?

Not at all, warns Berman. World demand for oil shows no signs of abating while the outlook for future production looks increasingly scant. And the competition among nations for this “master resource” will be much more intense in future decades than we’ve been used to:

Since the 1980s, we simply have not been replacing reserves with new discoveries. So how does that work? Well, obviously, we’ve got a lot of oil on production and in reserves, so we’re essentially drawing down our savings account if you want to think about it that way. You can do that for a long time if you’ve got a whole lot of money in your savings account, and we as a planet do. But you can’t do it forever.

Eventually, you either have to stop spending as much so you don’t draw down your savings, or you need to put some money back in the account. And it doesn’t seem like we’re doing much of either, and haven’t been doing much of either for a long time. So the concern is tremendous, at least, in my estimation(…)

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What’s Wrong With The U.S. Oil Export Boom

June 20, 2017

What’s Wrong With The U.S. Oil Export Boom

The lead editorial in Friday’s Wall Street Journal was pure energy nonsense.’

“Lessons of the Energy Export Boom” proclaimed that the United States is becoming the oil and gas superpower of the world. This despite the uncomfortable fact that it is also the world’s biggest importer of crude oil.

The piece includes the standard claptrap about how the fracking revolution has pushed break-even prices to absurdly low levels. But another article in the same newspaper on the same day described how producers are losing $0.33 on every dollar in the red hot Permian basin shale plays. Oops.

The main point of the editorial, however, is to celebrate a surge in U.S. oil exports to almost 1 million barrels per day in recent weeks. The Journal calls lifting the crude oil export ban that made this possible “a policy triumph.” What the editorial fails to mention is that exports actually fell after the ban was lifted, and only increased because of Nigerian production outages (Figure 1).

(Click to enlarge)

Figure 1. U.S. Oil Exports Have Increased As Nigerian Production Has Fallen. Source: EIA and Labyrinth Consulting Services, Inc.

Tight oil is ultra-light and can only be used in special refineries, most of which are in the U.S. It must be deeply discounted in order to be processed overseas in the relatively few niche refineries designed for light oil. That’s why Brent price is higher than WTI.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why We Can Expect Cripplingly Higher Oil Prices In The Near Future

June 21, 2016

Why We Can Expect Cripplingly Higher Oil Prices In The Near Future

The break-even price for Permian basin tight oil plays is about $61 per barrel (Table 1). That puts Permian plays among the lowest cost significant supply sources in the world. Although that is good news for U.S. tight oil plays, there is a dark side to the story.

Just because tight oil is low-cost compared to other expensive sources of oil doesn’t mean that it is cheap. Nor is it commercial at current oil prices.

The disturbing truth is that the real cost of oil production has doubled since the 1990s. That is very bad news for the global economy. Those who believe that technology is always the answer need to think about that.

Through that lens, Permian basin tight oil plays are the best of a bad, expensive lot.

Table 1. Weighted average break-even price for top operators in Permian basin tight oil plays. Source: Drilling Info, company documents and Labyrinth Consulting Services, Inc.

Not Shale Plays and Not New

The tight oil plays in the Permian basin are not shale plays. Spraberry and Bone Spring reservoirs are mostly sandstones and Wolfcamp reservoirs are mostly limestones.

Nor are they new plays. All have produced oil and gas for decades from vertically drilled wells. Reservoirs are commonly laterally discontinuous and, therefore, had poor well performance. Horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing have largely addressed those issues at drilling and completion costs of $6-7 million per well.

Permian Basin Overview

The Permian basin is among the most mature producing areas in the world. It has produced more than 31.5 billion barrels of oil and 112 trillion cubic feet of gas since 1921. Current production is approximately 1.9 million barrels of oil (mmbo) and 6.6 billion cubic feet of gas (bcfg) per day.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Peak Oil? What Peak Oil?

January 4, 2016

Peak Oil? What Peak Oil?

It is unbelievable how many times I’ve heard people telling me “the US has become self-sufficient in oil production,” a group that includes some respectable members of the EU parliament. This is probably due to the confusion that the media have made on the fact that the US production has recently surpassed the US imports of oil. It is true, but that tells you nothing of how much oil the US still imports. And that is, actually, much more than it was at the time of the oil crisis and domestic consumption is on the increase (as you see in the figure above, from Art Berman’s blog)

This misperception on the actual dependence of the US on imports is probably one of the reasons that led to the recent lifting of the ban on US exports, that dated from the time of the great oil crisis of the 1970s

Art Berman clarifies the situation and wonders why “consumption has increased by one-third and imports have doubled but we no longer need to think strategically about oil supply because production is a little higher?” Here is an excerpt from his post.
____________________________________________
The Crude Oil Export Ban–What, Me Worry About Peak Oil?

Congress ended the U.S. crude oil export ban last week. There is apparently no longer a strategic reason to conserve oil because shale production has made American great again. At least, that’s narrative that reality-averse politicians and their bases prefer.

The 1975 Energy Policy and Conservation Act (EPCA) that banned crude oil export was the closest thing to an energy policy that the United States has ever had. The law was passed after the price of oil increased in one month (January 1974) from $21 to $51 per barrel (2015 dollars) because of the Arab Oil Embargo.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Crude Oil Export Ban–What, Me Worry About Peak Oil?

December 28, 2015

The Crude Oil Export Ban–What, Me Worry About Peak Oil?

The EPCA not only banned the export of crude oil but also established the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Both measures were intended to keep more oil at home in order to make the U.S. less dependent on imported oil. A 55 mile-per-hour national speed limit was established to force conservation, and the International Energy Agency (IEA) was founded to better monitor and predict global oil supply and demand trends.

Above all, the export ban acknowledged that declining domestic supply and increased imports had made the country vulnerable to economic disruption. Its repeal last week suggests that there is no longer any risk associated with dependence on foreign oil.

What, Me Worry?

The tight oil revolution has returned U.S. crude oil production almost to its 1970 peak of 10 million barrels per day (mmbpd) and imports have been falling for the last decade (Figure 1).

Figure 1. U.S. crude oil production, net imports and consumption. Source: EIA and Labyrinth Consulting Services, Inc.
(Click image to enlarge)

But today, the U.S. imports twice as much oil (97%) as in 1974! In 2015, the U.S. imported 6.8 mmbpd of crude oil (net) compared to only 3.5 mmbpd at the time of the Arab Oil Embargo (Table 1).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What is the price of oil telling us?

August 17, 2015

What is the price of oil telling us?

Market fundamentalists tell us that prices convey information. Yet, while our barbers and hairdressers might be able to give us an extended account of why their prices have changed in the last few years, commodities such as oil–which reached a six-year low last week–stand mute. To fill that silence, many people are only too eager to speak for oil. And, they have been speaking volumes. So much information in that one price!

First, as prices fell last year when OPEC refused to cut its oil production in the face of slowing world demand, the industry kept saying that it could continue to produce from American tight oil fields at around $80 a barrel and be profitable. Then, as prices fell further, the industry and its consultants assured everyone that while growth in tight oil production would slow, it would still be profitable for the vast majority of wells planned.

Petroleum geologist and consultant Art Berman is probably the best representative from the skeptical camp. For many years Berman has been pointing to the high cost of getting fracked oil out of the ground. And, those costs led to negative free cash flow for most tight oil operators for several years in a row–that is, they spent considerably more cash than they took in, making up the balance with debt and stock issuance. Not surprisingly, the operators took that money and kept drilling as fast as they could.

It was a recipe for oversupply and a crash, one that is now threatening the solvency of many fracking-dependent U.S. oil companies.

As if to the rescue, the giant consulting firm Deloitte called a bottom in the oil price when U.S. futures prices hit $48 a barrel on February 4–a little prematurely it seems. Friday’s price for September futures on the NYMEX closed at $42.50.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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