Investment Chart Kondratiev Wave

Investment Chart Kondratiev Wave

Monday, 18 June 2012

Oil production to go up

The yearly energy report of BP shows that oil reserves are growing strongly. 72% of the conventional reserves is still in the Middle East. Lat year Iraq’s proven reserves grew the most, with 28B barrels (on total reserves of 1652B).
Especially reserves in Latin America and Africa grew.

These are the conventional reserves only. With the help of fracking (and horizontal drilling) the reserves will grow a lot further. The US could become the biggest oil producer in the world. Also Russia is investing in (US) fracking technology to remain the biggest oil producer in the world. China will probably soon follow. In the conventional production Iraq will show tremendous growth and become as big a producer as Saudi Arabia over some years.

The sudden rise of production in the US because of fracking is the most striking.

The reversal of the trend causes doubt about the peak oil theory of Hubbert (it remains true for individual fields, for example there are sound fears that the production from the biggest field in the world, the Saudi Ghawar field (http://bittooth.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/ogpss-current-oil-production-and-future.html)). The fall of conventional production in many countries will be replaced for the biggest part by fracking. (and total production will not fall because of rising production in Brazil, Iraq and some countries in Africa).
(source: http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/06/daily-chart-7)


What did Dudley (CEO of BP) say by the presentation of their annual report?

2011 was an exceptional year because of all the disruptions of the oil production in Libya and the sudden extra demand from Japan because of their horrible tsunami earthquake. Oil prices didn’t go up extremely because of the higher natural gas production in the US at much lower prices.

The growth of the energy demand comes from Emerging Markets, +5.3% in 2011 (China took 71% of that demand) while demand in the OECD countries went down with 0.8%. The growth in China was met mostly by higher coal production. Coal production in the world rose 5.4%, oil 1% and natural gas 2.3%.

The growth of the oil production in the US was mainly caused by the growth of shale oil production. This year the recovery of the production in Libya is important.

No comments:

Post a Comment