A Barrel Full

Brazil has apparently been mulling the idea of joining Opec for some time. Crackpot Chavez loves the idea:
Hugo Chavez Tuesday said the entrance of Brazil and other independent oil-producing countries in OPEC would invigorate the cartel.  
He is of course right that the great new hope of world oil supply joining the cartel would be […]

This time there was uncertainty over whether Opec would cut supply or not. In the end they chose not to.
The Conference therefore emphasized its commitment to comply fully with its decision of December 2008, in order to further contribute to market stability.  
This means that they will put pressure on non complying countries to meet […]

That’s the message from the General Secretary of the cartel.
Compliance with a 4.2 million b/d output reduction agreed in Algeria on December 17 was at 85% although he would like to see stricter compliance in order to prevent a further slide in oil markets faced with high consumer stocks and 80 million barrels of floating […]

Following a record year in 2007, there was a small decline in crude production in 2008.
Canadian crude production fell 3.31% to average about 2.68 million b/d in in 2008, federal agency Statistics Canada reported over the weekend. Production for the year totaled about 978 million barrels, down from 2007’s record high of 1.01 billion barrels, […]

The exact impact of falling prices on production is difficult, if not impossible to calculate. If the marginal cost ofs each barrel of oil were known, we could just make a spreadsheet. Unfortunately the data is just not available.
Proxys can be found everywhere however. Here is a good indicator. The rig count in North America.
The […]

I had a conversation a few days ago with someone who is expert in such matters, and I learned an important fact about global oil production.
Each year, production volumes at existing field decline by about 4 million barrels per day.
Therefore every year, we need new fields which can supply 4 million bbls/day of new oil, […]

Good news for Opti Canada, just a shame about the timing.
OPTI Canada Inc. announces the start-up of the Long Lake Upgrader and production of its first Premium Sweet Crude.
Whilst they claim to have the most cost effective way of producing syn crude from Canadian tar sands, no doubt it would be a lot more attractive at […]

Unlike every other company making announcements concerning investments, Brazil’s Petrobras is planning to increase upstream investment.
Brazil’s state-led Petrobras plans to spend $174.4 billion for capital expenditures over the next four years, CEO Jose Gabrielli said Friday. The 2009-2013 spending would best by 36% the $112.4 billion plan Petrobras had in place for 2008-2012.
This underlines the fact […]

Brazil’s Petrobras, is a company that sits on a large amount of potential reserves. In global terms they are the 15th largest oil company, and moving up the table. They have just announced that they broke an export record in December.

In December, Petrobras set an exports record of 620,000 barrels per day of national oils, […]

Russian Crude production was down at the end of last year and for the year as a whole.
Russia’s crude output fell 0.7% to 488.105 million mt (9.735 millionbarrels/day) in 2008 from the previous year, preliminary figures from thecountry’s energy ministry showed Friday.
So prices have been falling as production from Russia, non Opec’s largest exporter have […]