Stephen Hawking & 1000 academics, researchers & public figures warn of #KillerRobot arms race http://t.co/6ScN78YyEz pic.twitter.com/uLX0pTg8cV
— Andrew Stroehlein (@astroehlein) July 27, 2015
it was an interesting week in the fracking patch, at least for us numbers nerds....among other anomalies, we saw the largest increase in oil rigs in 15 months, a 2.5 million barrel build in crude oil inventory, the largest such increase since early April, and the largest one week summertime buildup of crude stores since August 23, 2013, and finally the largest jump in imports in 11 weeks, which pushed the monthly oil imports stats higher than a year ago....so as usual, we'll look at how that all shook out, and take a guess at what might be happening here...
otherwise, it was apparently a quiet week in the fracking patch, which saw only one major explosive oil related accident cross my news-feeds...early Monday morning, a barge carrying roughly a million gallons of petroleum naphtha burst into flames after a collision with another barge near the entrance to the Houston Ship Channel, that actually involved six vessels maneuvering thru the area...two tugboats, one hauling two barges of naphtha and the other hauling two barges of isopropylbenzene, were passing each other moving in opposite directions near the harbor entrance when the tug pushing the isopropylbenzene lost power, sending its barges drifting without power, and as one of it's barges careened into a naphtha barge, the fire broke out...as naphtha is a very flammable gasoline additive, the fire raged for four hours, lighting Galveston Bay, before Houston firefighters and Coast Guard fire crews were able to extinguish it...some of the naphtha and possibly other chemicals leaked into the ship channel, exposing sensitive conservation areas, leaving officials still assessing the environmental impact...by Monday night, the three damaged vessels were moved out of the way, allowing one side of the ship channel to reopen... as a major oil and petrochemical port, the Houston ship channel is a frequent site of spills; in March, we reported that a collision between a tanker and a bulk carrier spilled thousands of barrels of MTBE, a flammable toxic chemical, at almost the same spot as this barge mishap...
while there were major changes in most other oil metrics, US crude oil production was nearly unchanged in this week's report, slipping to 9,558,000 barrels per day in the week ending July 17th, from 9,562,000 barrels per day the prior week...that output rate was up 11.6% from our oil output of 8,565,000 barrels per day in the third week of July last year, and less than a half percent below the modern crude oil production record of 9,610,000 barrels per day in first week of June this year...but even with near record oil production, oil companies and speculators still managed to import 7,941,000 barrels per day during the week, up from 7,354,000 barrels per day last week and the third highest imports in any week over the past year...so this week's imports were up 7.2% from the same week a year ago, and the weekly Petroleum Status Report (62 pp pdf) shows our 4 week average of crude oil imports was over 7.5 million barrels per day, which was 2.5% above the same four-week period last year...
part of the reason for the jump in imports was that our refineries were running just about flat out, with refinery input of 16,870,000 barrels per day in this week's report, up from 16,825,000 barrels per day last week, as refineries were running at a post recession high of 95.5% of operable capacity over the week ending July 17th...still, that 45,000 barrels per day in additional refinery throughput doesn't account for the 587,000 barrels per day in additional imports we were bringing in, so we find that that excess that we've imported this week has been added to our already record high stockpiles of crude oil we have in storage, as U.S. commercial crude inventories rose by nearly 2.5 million barrels, from 461,417,000 barrels last week to 463,885,000 barrels as of July 17th...that works out to more than 25.0% more oil in storage than 371,071,000 barrels we had stored at the end of the third week of July last year, and nearly 20% more than had ever been stored in mid July in the 80 years of EIA record keeping, which had never seen the 400 million barrel level breached before this year...
what appears to be happening here is probably the same thing we saw when oil prices were collapsing in early March, wherein contracts for oil to be delivered in the future are at a price somewhat higher than the cost of buying oil now, such that it theoretically pays for speculators to buy oil and pay for its storage, in the expectation that it will be able to be sold back at a higher price in the future; as we noted then, much of this is done on paper, but some of this so-called contango trade is obviously being done with the physical commodity, and that demand to put oil in storage for speculative reasons at the same time our refineries are running flat out is creating a demand for more imports, even though our field production of crude oil is near a record high...but as i warned in March, for every buyer of a speculative contract, there has to be a seller, so for every one who's buying oil contracts like this, betting on higher prices, there is someone on the other side of those trades, be it a bank, commodities house, or an oil company, selling that contract and effectively betting on lower prices...they both can't be winners, someone is going to lose, and possibly do us some economic damage in the process, just as we saw when the market for housing derivatives went belly up during the GFC...
however, there was no obvious reason for the rather large jump in the oil rig count this week...US oil prices fell another 4% this week, after falling 4% the prior week and 12% the week before that, and in closing this week at $48.14 a barrel, they're back to the level where 97% of the shale plays in the US are unprofitable...despite that, Baker Hughes reported that the count of active drilling rigs in the US rose by 19 rigs from last week to 876, with oil rigs up 21 to 659, gas rigs down 2 to 216, and miscellaneous rigs unchanged at 1...that's still 1007 less than the same week a year ago, as 903 oil rigs, 102 gas rigs, and 2 miscellaneous rigs have been shut down over that period...
unlike the past couple months, there was also an increase in unconventional drilling rigs, as horizontal rigs in use rose by 12 to 662, while active vertical rigs rose by 8 to 131 and directional rigs fell by 1 to 83...those numbers are down from 1293 horizontal, 361 vertical, and 229 directional that were in use a year ago....of the 19 rigs added this week, 17 were land based and 2 were added on inland waters, bringing the land rig total to 841 and the lake rig total to 4, while the total offshore rig count remained unchanged at 31 for the 3rd week in a row...a year ago, we had 1805 land based rigs operating, 18 drilling inland waters, and 59 drillships working offshore...
in yet another oddity, there were no net losses of rigs in any major oil basin, nor in any state over the past week...of the major basins, frackers added 3 rigs in the Permian, 3 rigs in the Haynesville, 2 in the Eagle Ford, 2 in the Cana Woodford, and one each in the Williston, the Utica, and the Granite Wash...that leaves 245 rigs active in the Permian, which is down from 555 a year ago, 29 rigs working in the Haynesville, down from 43 last July 18th, 100 in the Eagle Ford, down from 211, 33 in the Cana Woodford, up from 31, 70 in the Williston, down from 184, 23 in the Utica, down from 45, and 16 in the Granite Wash, which is down from 76 a year earlier...in addition, the Marcellus rig count, which was unchanged at 59 rigs this week, is down from 78 a year ago, while the Niobrara chalk of the Rockies front range was unchanged at 31 but down from 60 a year earlier...
within state boundaries, Texas added 8 rigs, bringing the state up to 374 this week , but down from the 886 rigs that were running in Texas last year; Louisiana added 7 rigs by adding 2 in the Haynesville, 2 on inland lakes, 4 in the southern part of the state, while one Louisiana offshore rig was shut down (Texas had added a rig offshore)...Louisiana now has 76 rigs operating, down from 119 a year ago...in other states that added rigs, Oklahoma was up 2 rigs to 107, but down from 204 a year ago, New Mexico was up 1 to 51 but down from 94 a year ago, North Dakota was up 1 to 69 but down from 178 a year ago, Pennsylvania was up 1 to 44 but down from 53 a year ago, and Ohio was up 1 to 20 but down from 43 a year ago...the rig count in all other states was unchanged this week..
(Note: from Focus on Fracking, where you can other fracking patch news from last week)
U.S.: Netanyahu raised new conditions in his speech to Congress, then refused to discuss them http://t.co/gjoA7kWzjv pic.twitter.com/wxx5uObfRT
— Haaretz.com (@haaretzcom) July 23, 2015
there was a major spill in Alberta this week that got a lot less news coverage than we would have expected, given that it now appears to have been one of the largest environmental spills on land in North American history...on Wednesday, a contractor for the pipeline operator Nexen, now a wholly owned subsidiary of Chinese oil giant CNOOC, discovered a spill of tar sands emulsion covering 16,000 square meters, mostly along the route of their feeder pipeline from area wells to the Long Lake oilsands processing facility south of Fort McMurray in Northeast Alberta, about 200 miles north of Edmonton....after the flow was shut off, the company determined that 5 million liters of emulsion, or a solution of tar, produced water and sand, had leaked out, but their automatic detection system hadn't detect the rupture in their double walled "fail-safe" pipeline over the period of the spill, the cause of which they are still investigating...the emulsion that spilled is the product of tar sands mining, whereby superheated steam is injected deep into the tarsands, which forces the emulsion of tar, sand and produced water to flow out to the surface and into the pipeline...although the spill contaminated more than three hectares of beaver ponds and boreal muskeg bog in a densely forested area, it did not affect water supplies, as a nearby lake was protected by a berm which had been previously constructed for that purpose...access to the area, which is frozen much of the year, was restricted by the now soft ground, so a road had to be built and special mats had to be laid on the surface nearby to facilitate moving cleanup crews and equipment into the area...as of Friday, Nexen said its crews were working “around the clock” to clean up the spilled emulsion, which at 5,000 cubic meters of emulsion over a 16,000 square meter area must have largely sunk far into the peat like muskeg by now...
meanwhile, a spill of roughly 35,000 gallons of oil from a derailed train in eastern Montana garnered nearly as much press coverage...on Thursday evening, a Burlington Northern oil unit train pulling 106 loaded crude oil cars saw 21 of its tankers leave the rails near Culbertson, Montana, near the North Dakota border, of which only 2 remained upright...subsequently it was determined that 3 of the cars were leaking their loads, resulting in evacuations of nearby residents and closure of US Route 2, the region’s main artery...even with a downed power line near the leaking crude, County Sheriff Jason Frederick said that there was no immediate threat to public safety, but nonetheless he and other first responders kept their distance until a Burlington Northern haz-mat team could be brought in from Texas...and even though it's unlikely it could have been anything else, rail officials refused to say if the train was hauling explosive crude from North Dakota’s Bakken oil patch, the crude involved in the fiery derailments earlier this year...
prior to those two spills, a pump station pipeline owned by Plains All-American, the company responsible for the Santa Barbara beachfront spill at the end of May, ruptured and dumped more than 4,200 gallons of crude oil into a creek in southwest Illinois, about 40 miles east of St. Louis near Highland, Illinois...the company was on site fairly quickly and said they had deployed 2,700 feet of booms keep the oil from reaching Highland Silver Lake, which supplies drinking water to Highland...apparently this pipeline also did not have automated leak detection and shutoff technology either, because the rupture occurred overnight and was not noticed until a citizen reported the spill sometime between 7 and 8 a.m on Friday morning...
in other widely covered news of interest to us here in Ohio, a two-year study of the Utica shale by federal, state and university researchers estimated the Utica formation holds 782 trillion cubic feet of recoverable gas and nearly 2 billion barrels of oil, which would be 20 times more recoverable gas and twice as much recoverable oil as previously estimated...that would make the Utica bigger than the Marcellus, which had been considered the largest shale gas deposit in the US and the second largest in the world until this study...while the Utica is 4,000 to 6,000 feet below the Marcellus and hence more expensive to drill to, it generally makes up for that by being thicker, with the added fracking bonus of the Point Pleasant shale formation, an even more organic rock, immediately below it in Ohio...
now, you must be asking why, with the glut of gas and oil already driving prices below the cost of recovery, would the industry be so anxious to exploit these other formations for gas? the reason is that they already have a waiting customer; this week saw the christening of the first two “Dragon Class” Chinese LNG tankers, each nearly 800 feet long and able to carry over 27,500 cubic meters of liquefied gas....built by Sinopacific Offshore and Engineering, they are owned by Swiss petrochemical manufacturer Ineos Group Ltd, and will make their first transatlantic delivery of US gas to Europe later this month...Ineos has 6 more of these large tankers being built, and plans a “virtue pipeline” to transport over 800,000 tons of gas a year at minus 90 degrees centigrade across the Atlantic to their plants in Norway and Scotland.....once this gets up and running, we’d expect Americans to soon be paying European prices for their natural gas..
for now, though, US natural gas prices remain depressed and US oil prices are falling again, shedding another 4% this week to close at $50.89 a barrel, down about $10 / barrel from a month ago...that's finally starting to impact oilfield activity, as the number of drilling rigs running this week fell for the first time in 4 weeks, dropping by 6 rigs to 857, with oil rigs down 7 to 638, gas rigs up 1 to 218, and miscellaneous rigs unchanged at 1...that's down from the 1871 rigs that were in use the same week a year ago, with oil rigs down 916, gas rigs down 97, and miscellaneous rigs down 1 from that time...of the net rigs idled, 3 had been land based and 3 had been on inland waters; the count of the later is now down to 2 from 18 last year, while offshore rigs in the gulf of mexico were unchanged from last week at 31 but down from the year ago 57....and speaking of offshore, shutting down a rig is not a cost free operation, either, especially since many of those drilling rigs are leased...just this week, ConocoPhillips decided to terminate their contract with Ensco to use their DS-9 drillship in the Gulf of Mexico; as a result, ConocoPhillips must pay Ensco termination fees equal to about two years’ worth of daily renting of the rig, or around $550,000 per day for two years, plus other fees that Ensco might incur from the contract cancellation...
in keeping with the trend we've seen over the past several weeks, unconventional drillers idled rigs, while conventional drillers added them…two additional vertical drilling rigs were added to bring that total to 123, while.there were 650 horizontal rigs in use at week end, down 4 from a week ago and down 693 from the same week last year, and 84 directional rigs remaining, also down 4 from a week ago and down 133 from the 217 directional rigs running on the 3rd Friday of July last year...
within the major shale basins, the Eagle Ford saw a net reduction of 4 rigs, leaving 98; the Marcellus saw 3 idled, leaving 59, while the Williston count dropped by 2 to 69...there were also rig reductions in all the Woodford shales, which hadn't seen many prior cuts; the Ardmore Woodford was down 2 to 5, the Cana Woodford was down 2 to 31, and the Arkoma Woodford was down 1 to 5....the Haynesville shale also saw a rig idled, while Permian basin drillers added 3 rigs, 2 were added in the Granite Wash, and the Utica shale and Niobrara chalk both saw the addition of 1 rig each...by state, Louisiana, where three inland water rigs were shut down, saw the greatest reduction, while 2 rigs were pulled Texas, Pennsylvania and North Dakota, and California and Oklahoma each saw one rig idled...meanwhile, drillers in Alaska, Colorado, Kansas and New Mexico each added a rig, while the rig count in Ohio and other states not herein mentioned was unchanged
meanwhile, US crude oil production fell to 9,562,000 barrels per day in the week ending July 3rd, down from the near record 9,604,000 barrels per day the prior week, but still up 11.3% from our oil output of 8,592,000 barrels per day in the second week of July last year...however, with US refineries operating at 95.3% of their operable capacity and refinery inputs of crude averaging 16.825 million barrels per day during the week ending July 10th, 229,000 barrels per day more than the the prior week, our imports of crude oil rose to 7,354,000 barrels per day, from 7,316,000 in the previous week, 1% more than the 7,427,000 we imported in the same week last year...that's a volatile figure, however, as weekly oil imports are often dependent on how many super tankers arrive and are offloaded during any given week, so we check the weekly Petroleum Status Report (62 pp pdf) for the 4 week average, which at an average of over 7.2 million barrels per day, leaves our 4 week import total 1.3% below the same 4 week period last year...but also note that U.S. commercial crude inventories fell for the first time in three weeks, from 465,763,000 barrels last week to 461,417,000 as of July t0th, which was still 23.0% more oil than 375,040,000 barrels we had stored at the end of the second week of July last year, and in fact much higher than had ever been stored in mid July in the 80 years of EIA record keeping, which had never seen the 400 million barrel level breached before this year...
(NB: the rest of the week’s fracking patch news is here)
Chattanooga shooting: 'Four dead' at Tennessee US Navy centres - BBC News: 
the past week saw the first significant change in oil prices in the past 3 months, as US crude oil prices crashed 8% to $52.53 a barrel on Monday, then fell another 4% on Tuesday before moving higher, and finally drifted back up on Thursday and Friday to close the week at $52.80 a barrel....the immediate reason given for the Monday price crash was the Sunday vote in the Greek referendum, in which around 62% of the Greeks marked their ballots "OXI", which we're told translates as "hell no", meaning they rejected terms of a bailout offered by the Troika of the EU, the ECB, and the IMF representing their international creditors, which had imposed austerity on the Greeks & squeezed the Greek banks into a shutdown...however, an ongoing crash in the Chinese stock markets, where investors had lost more than $3.4 trillion in equity value since mid-June (ie, a half a trillion more than the GDP of France) was probably a larger factor, as a pullback by the Chinese, the world's largest importer of oil, would have a much greater impact on oil demand than an exit from the Eurozone by Greece...and that concern was certainly exacerbated by an International Energy Agency forecast that the rebalancing of the oil markets would extend well into 2016 in the face of a global market that was “massively oversupplied”…
up until late last week, US oil prices had steadied in a range near $60 a barrel since early April, after nearing $45 in price dives in January and March ...this had seemed to result in some equilibrium in drilling activity, as the net change in the total rig count over the last month was minimal...however, the $60 price and drop in the rig count hadn't affected oil production, either, as we had hit a 32 year high in output at 9,610,000 barrels per day during the first week of June, and we virtually matched that this past week with output of 9,604,000 barrels per day...early on in the oil price decline, oil companies managed to stay afloat because they had largely hedged their drilling operations to pay off at higher prices even if oil prices fell...the higher oil prices of last year also enabled them to continue to borrow heavily to fund operations during the first part of this year, based on the value of their reserves in October, when banks had last evaluated the drillers for credit worthiness, and when oil prices were between $80 and $85 a barrel....their access to funds now is limited by their latest semi-annual evaluation in April, when their reserves were valued between $50 and $55 a barrel...and with oil futures prices now also below $60 a barrel out until 2017, they've lost the ability to hedge their new drilling at prices up to $90 a barrel as they have in the past...so we have to believe with further weakness in oil prices now, we should soon see another pullback in the fracking patch, especially among the smaller drillers who are not as well capitalized as the oil giants...
the oil price drop does not appear to have affected oilfield operations yet this week, however, as there were 5 more oil rigs operating in the US than last week, when we saw 12 oil rigs added in the first oil rig increase in 29 weeks...meanwhile, 2 gas rigs were idled this week after 9 were shut down last week...with the additional stacking of 2 miscellaneous rigs, it left the total rig count at week end up 1 at 863, with 645 oil rigs, 217 gas rigs, and 1 miscellaneous rig remaining in operation...that's down from 1563 oil rigs, 311 gas rigs, and 1 miscellaneous rig that were operating as of the second weekend in July a year ago...the configuration of rigs operating in the US as of July 10th included 654 horizontal rigs, 121 vertical rigs, and 88 directional rigs, with conventional vertical rigs increasing by 13 this week after increasing by 1 last week, while horizontal drilling rigs were reduced by 3 both this week and last week and directional rigs dropped 9 this week after falling 1 last week; that's consistent with the trend of recent weeks, so while the overall rig count has stabilized, oil companies continue to idle fracking operations while they increase conventional drilling...
the pullback in fracking operations has not been consistent across all basins, however...for instance, the past week saw an addition of 7 rigs in the west Texas & eastern New Mexico Permian basin, after 1 rig was added there last week; this most active of all areas now shows 239 active rigs, which is still down from 563 a year ago; the Eagle Ford, in southeast Texas, saw 4 rigs pulled this week after 3 were added last week; they now have 102 rigs running, down from 218 a year ago...the Williston basin in North Dakota shows 71 rigs operating as of Friday, down from 179 a year ago, as 6 rigs were idled this week after 3 were started up last week...62 rigs remain in the Marcellus, down just 18 from last year's 80, but 2 of those were stacked this week after 1 was stacked last week...the 3 Woodford shale plays in Oklahoma saw a net loss of one rig over the past two weeks, with the Ardmore Woodford at 7, unchanged from last year, the Arkoma Woodford at 6, down from 7, and the Cana Woodford at 33, up from 27 and the only shale basin to see an increase in rigs since last year...there were 27 rigs running in the Haynesville shale of western Louisiana, which was unchanged over the past two week and down from 42 a year ago, while a rig was added in the Utica shale in each of the past two weeks to bring the total there back up to 21, down from 44 a year ago..those changes in the primary basins pretty much account for the changes in the state rig counts, except for Kansas, which rid themselves of 3 rigs over the past two weeks and now has 10, down from 31 a year ago...
in addition to the weekly North American rig counts, which also showed the Canadian rig count 30 higher than last week at 169, with oil rigs up 19 to 91, and gas rigs up 11 to 78, Baker Hughes also released the international rig count for June this week, which indicated that there were 1146 drilling rigs in operation outside of the US and Canada in June, down 12 from May's 1158 and down 198 from last June's 1344...the pullback in drilling was concentrated in Latin America, where the working rig total fell by 13 to 314, with a drop in offshore rigs by 7 to 62 and a reduction in land based rigs by 6 to 252, as the Mexican rig count fell by 9 from 60 to 51...a net of two rigs were also idled in the Asia Pacific area, leaving the region with 215, down from 251 last year, as India, now with 113, added 4 rigs while Indonesian drillers shut down 5, leaving 23...Europeans shut down 3, leaving 113, as the UK idled 4 offshore rigs, leaving 12 offshore remaining....meanwhile, 3 rigs were added in Africa, which ran 103 rigs in June, as Algerian rigs rose from 48 to 51 while several other countries on the continent increased or reduced theirs by 1...finally, the Middle East also added 3, bringing their June total to 401, as Egypt added 5, Kuwait and Abu-Dhabi both added 2, while the Saudis reduced their working rigs by 3 to 121...while the Saudis are now down from using 126 rigs two months ago, they're up from 104 rigs they were running a year ago and up from 82 rigs in June of 2013...and remember, when the Saudis drill a well, it produces for 40 years before the flow tapers off; but when the frackers drill one, it produces decently for 2 years and by then it's 80% depleted...the Saudis produced a record 10.3 million barrels per day in May, and claim they're ready to increase their oil output in the coming months....the frackers have to frack faster and faster just to stay in the same place...
meanwhile, as we mentioned earlier, US crude oil production rose to 9,604,000 barrels per day in the week ending July 3rd, up from 9,595,000 barrels per day the prior week, and up 12.8% from our output of 8,514,000 barrels per day in the first week of July of 2014...with near record production, our imports of crude oil fell by nearly 200,000 barrels per day, from 7,513,000 last week to 7,316,000 this week, which still works out to be a bit more than the 7,285,000 we imported in the same week last year...with lower priced oil, gross profit margins for refineries are up more than 50% from a year ago; the weekly Petroleum Status Report (62 pp pdf) indicates that US refineries were operating at 94.7% of their operable capacity last week, as refinery inputs averaged 16.6 million barrels per day, up 65,000 barrels per day from last week, but still short of the record 16.8 million barrels per day they processed in the 2nd and 3rd week of July last year...thus, with field production of crude near a record and imports virtually unchanged from a year ago, U.S. commercial crude inventories unseasonably rose for a second week in a row, adding 384,000 barrels of oil to the 465,379,000 barrels of oil that were in storage last week to give us 465,763,000 total barrels of oil in storage on July 3rd, 21.7% higher than the same week last year, and in fact much higher than had ever been stored in the 80 years of EIA record keeping, which had never seen the 400 million barrel level breached before this year...
</ br>(the above was crossposted from Focus on Fracking, where you'll find more oil patch news...)
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