{"id":18247,"date":"2016-02-25T14:03:28","date_gmt":"2016-02-25T19:03:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=18247"},"modified":"2016-02-25T14:30:39","modified_gmt":"2016-02-25T19:30:39","slug":"uk-oil-industry-at-the-edge-of-a-chasm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=18247","title":{"rendered":"UK Oil Industry At The \u201cEdge Of A Chasm\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

UK Oil Industry At The \u201cEdge Of A Chasm\u201d<\/a><\/h3>\n
Oil production from the North Sea could plummet over the next decade, an outcome that will largely result from the inability of oil companies to invest in upstream exploration today.<\/div>\n
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Oil & Gas UK, an industry trade group, said in a\u00a0new report<\/a>\u00a0that the North Sea is entering a period of \u201csuper maturity.\u201d The North Sea has been a source of sizable oil production for decades, but it is long past its prime.<\/p>\n

The UK\u2019s offshore sector is already a shadow of its former self. Consider this: three decades ago the UK produced twice as much oil from its offshore sector than it does today, and that oil came from one quarter of the number of fields. That was possible because the fields of yesteryear were large \u2013 on average five times the size of new discoveries today. The industry is now merely picking over the remaining scraps of the North Sea, most of which comes at great expense.<\/p>\n

Maturing and high-cost oil fields had significant challenges before the oil price downturn. But at current prices, half of the UK\u2019s North Sea oil fields are not recovering even their operating costs. The number of fields expected to be shut down between 2015 and 2020 increased by 20 percent since last year. The worrying thing from the industry\u2019s perspective is that as fields cease production, the cost of maintaining infrastructure \u2013 often shared among producers \u2013 stays the same, raising the costs for the remaining players. That could lead to a \u201cdomino effect\u201d that spread to other companies. In 2015, 21 oil fields shut down because of low oil prices.<\/p>\n

If companies are not able to even cover their operating costs, investing in new fields makes no sense at all. Oil & Gas UK estimate in their report that the sector will see less than \u00a31 billion in investment in 2016.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

UK Oil Industry At The \u201cEdge Of A Chasm\u201d Oil production from the North Sea could plummet over the next decade, an outcome that will largely result from the inability of oil companies to invest in upstream exploration today. Oil & Gas UK, an industry trade group, said in a\u00a0new report\u00a0that the North Sea is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[6010,3331,1729,5332,820,2707],"class_list":["post-18247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","tag-nick-cunningham","tag-north-sea","tag-oil-and-gas-industry","tag-oilprice-com","tag-uk","tag-uk-oil-production"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18247"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18247\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18249,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18247\/revisions\/18249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}