In 1982 there were over 250 operating crude oil refineries in the United States; that number declined to 132 by 2019, according to data from the US Department of Energy (DOE). Meanwhile, the total distillation capacity of all refineries combined increased from a low of 14.4 million barrels per calendar... Read more →

ExxonMobil announced an oil discovery offshore Guyana at the Mako-1 well southeast of the Liza field, marking the 15th discovery on the Stabroek Block. Mako-1 encountered approximately 164 feet (50 meters) of a high-quality oil bearing sandstone reservoir. Mako-1, drilled in 5,315 feet (1,620 meters) of water, is located approximately... Read more →

ExxonMobil has started oil production from the Liza field offshore Guyana ahead of schedule and less than five years after the first discovery of hydrocarbons, which is well ahead of the industry average for deepwater developments. The Liza Phase 1 development is approximately 190 kilometers offshore in water depths of... Read more →

Chevron Corporation has sanctioned the Anchor project in the US Gulf of Mexico (GOM). This marks the industry’s first deepwater high-pressure development to achieve a final investment decision. Delivery of the new technology, which is capable of handling pressures of 20,000 psi, also enables access to other high-pressure resource opportunities... Read more →

Annual petroleum production in the United States doubled from 6.8 million barrels per day (mmbd) in 2008 to 15.3 mmbd in 2018, according to the US Department of Energy (DOE). Record levels of production began when the 11.8 mmbd in 2014 topped the previous high of 11.3 mmbd from 1970.... Read more →

Researchers from the Center for Functional Nanomaterials at Brookhaven National Laboratory and users from ExxonMobil have developed a new approach to identifying atoms that are neither carbon nor hydrogen within a specific type of molecule in crude oil. The team used non-contact atomic force microscopy (nc–AFM), a process in which... Read more →

The Government of Alberta, Canada, is now allowing curtailed operators to drill new conventional oil wells without being restricted by production limits. Existing producing wells will remain under curtailment. The government said that this measure will drive positive investment, lead to increased drilling activity, and support economic growth in communities... Read more →

US shale production—the chief source of rapid growth that made the United States the world’s largest oil producer—is slowing down fast, says a new report by IHS Markit. The new IHS Markit outlook for oil market fundamentals for 2019-2021 expects total US production growth to be 440,000 barrels per day... Read more →

Equinor and the Johan Sverdrup partnership consisting of Lundin Norway, Petoro, Aker BP and Total, have started production from the giant field in the North Sea, more than two months ahead of and NOK 40 billion (US4.4 billion) below the original estimates in the Plan for development and operation. Johan... Read more →

Conventional oil and gas discoveries during the past three years are at the lowest levels in seven decades and a significant rebound is not expected, according to a new report by global business information provider IHS Markit. The low levels in discoveries come as a result of a pullback during... Read more →

Drones attacked two key Saudi Aramco sites in Saudi Arabia—the Abqaiq processing plant and the Khurais oil field—on Saturday; Houthi rebels claimed credit for the strikes. Saudi Aramco emergency crews contained the fires at the plants; the company announced the production suspension of 5.7 million barrels of crude oil per... Read more →

BP has agreed to sell its entire business in Alaska to Hilcorp Alaska, based in Anchorage, Alaska. Under the terms of the agreement, Hilcorp will purchase all of BP’s interests in the state for a total consideration of $5.6 billion. The sale will include BP’s entire upstream and midstream business... Read more →

Crude oil and gas naturally escape from the seabed in many places known as seeps. There, these hydrocarbons move up from source rocks through fractures and sediments towards the surface, where they leak out of the ground and sustain a diversity of densely populated habitats in the dark ocean. A... Read more →

Canadian researchers have developed a large-scale economical method to extract hydrogen from oil sands (natural bitumen) and oil fields. This can be used to power hydrogen-powered vehicles, which are already marketed in some countries, as well as to generate electricity. The process can extract hydrogen from existing oil sands reservoirs,... Read more →

Total US petroleum demand averaged 20.8 million barrels per day (mb/d) in July 2019, which represented a 0.9% year-over-year increase and the highest demand for the month since 2005, according to the latest Monthly Statistical Report released by the American Petroleum Institute (API). This was a decrease of 0.9% from... Read more →

The transportation sector in the US consumes more petroleum than any other sector, and that share has increased over time from about 50% in 1950 to about 70% in 2018, according to the US Department of Energy (DOE). US petroleum consumption increased threefold between 1950 and 2018, from 6.5 million... Read more →

BP and Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) have agreed to form a new joint venture that will include a retail service station network and aviation fuels business across India. Building on Reliance’s existing Indian fuel retailing network and an aviation fuel business, the partners expect the venture to expand rapidly to... Read more →

Eni has released the 18th edition of the World Oil, Gas and Renewables Review, the annual statistics report on oil, natural gas and renewables sources. The first volume of the report, the World Oil Review, is devoted to oil reserves, supply, demand, trade and prices with a special focus on... Read more →

Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories, the Department of Energy’s Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies and the Aramco Research Center in Boston have found that a particular form of nanoscale corrosion is responsible for unpredictably decreasing the working life of steel pipes, according to an open-access paper recently published in Nature’s Materials... Read more →

ExxonMobil is progressing growth plans to increase its earnings and cash flow potential while researching technology breakthroughs to reduce emissions, Chairman and CEO Darren Woods said during the company’s annual meeting today. ExxonMobil expects to increase annual earnings potential by more than 140% and double potential annual cash flow from... Read more →

Royal Dutch Shell plc, through its subsidiary Shell Offshore Inc (Shell) has started production at the Shell-operated Appomattox floating production system months ahead of schedule, opening a new frontier in the deep-water US Gulf of Mexico. Shell’s Appomattox Platform in the Gulf of Mexico Appomattox, which currently has an expected... Read more →

Shell Offshore Inc., a subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell plc, announced a significant discovery at the Blacktip prospect in the deep water US Gulf of Mexico. Evaluation is ongoing and appraisal planning is underway to further delineate the discovery and define development options. Blacktip is Shell’s second material discovery in... Read more →

Total OECD annual production of crude oil, natural gas liquids (NGL), and refinery feedstocks increased by 10.3% in 2018 compared to 2017, reaching a record total monthly production of over 100 million tons at the beginning of the year and remaining above this for almost all of 2018, according to... Read more →

Chevron Corporation entered into a definitive agreement with Anadarko Petroleum Corporation to acquire all of the outstanding shares of Anadarko in a stock and cash transaction valued at $33 billion, or $65 per share. Chevron said that its acquisition of Anadarko will significantly enhance its upstream portfolio and further strengthen... Read more →

By Cyril Widdershoven for Oilprice.com. The long-awaited Saudi Aramco acquisition of Saudi Basic Industries Corporation (SABIC) is finally here. With a statement to the press, Aramco CEO Amin Nasser reported that Aramco has acquired a 70 percent stake in SABIC, with an estimated value of $69.1 billion. Aramco’s CEO Nasser... Read more →

by Michael Sivak. In this analysis, I examined the relation between crude-oil production and crude-oil reserves in the world and in the United States. The variable of interest was the amount of crude oil produced as a percentage of proved reserves of crude oil. (This variable is inversely related to... Read more →

California air quality regulators released a report recommending actions to improve emergency and routine air monitoring at California’s major oil refineries and in the communities that surround them. Many communities near major refineries live in fear of exposure to airborne pollutants during a major refinery incident—or during normal operations. The... Read more →

Petroleum refineries in the US Gulf Coast increasingly rely on merchant suppliers, rather than their own production, to provide the hydrogen used to reduce the sulfur content of fuel, according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA). As global demand for distillate fuel oil has increased and sulfur content regulations... Read more →

ExxonMobil and Chevron have separately announced plans for significant boosts in their production in the Permian Basin. ExxonMobil has revised its Permian Basin growth plans to produce more than 1 million oil-equivalent barrels per day by as early as 2024—an increase of nearly 80% and a significant acceleration of value.... Read more →

by Cyril Widdershoven for Oilprice.com. Global oil and gas companies are increasingly facing an uphill battle as global warming policies are taking their toll. Most analysts and market watchers are focusing on peak oil demand scenarios, but the reality could be much darker. International oil companies (IOCs) are likely to... Read more →

by Nick Cunningham of Oilprice.com. By 2030, oil demand could hit a peak and then enter decline, according to a new report. For the next decade or so, oil demand should continue to grow, although at a slower and slower rate. According to Bank of America Merrill Lynch, the annual... Read more →

As part of a strategy to continue providing low-emissions solutions for harsh offshore operating environments, Siemens has opened a fully robotized and digitalized plant in Norway that will develop and manufacture energy storage technologies for both marine and offshore oil and gas applications. Eventually, the plant will assemble 55 battery... Read more →

By Nick Cunningham of Oilprice.com. The number of drilled but uncompleted wells (DUCs) in the U.S. shale patch has skyrocketed by roughly 60 percent over the past two years. That leaves a rather large backlog that could add a wave of new supply, even if the pace of drilling begins... Read more →

China will drive the majority of growth in the crude oil refining industry in Asia between 2018 and 2023, contributing 44% of Asia’s crude oil refining capacity in 2023, according to GlobalData. The company’s report: ‘China Crude Oil Refinery Outlook to 2023’ finds that the total refining capacity of China... Read more →

The Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Fossil Energy announced up to $88 million in federal funding for cost-shared research and development projects enhancing technologies for oil and natural gas recovery under two separate funding opportunity announcements (FOAs). The National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) will manage the projects selected under... Read more →

by Nick Cunningham of Oilprice.com. Oil prices regained more ground on Wednesday, pushed higher after equity markets rebounded from an initial selloff at the start of 2019 trading. The price gains are not entirely convincing. WTI and Brent posted strong gains, each up more than 3 percent by midday in... Read more →

by Irina Slav for Oilprice.com. To cut and push up prices or not to cut and preserve market share, this is the question that Saudi Arabia is facing ahead of this year’s December OPEC meeting. It seems like just yesterday when OPEC met in 2016 and decided to cut production... Read more →

Petrochemicals—components derived from oil and gas that are used in all sorts of daily products such as plastics, fertilizers, packaging, clothing, digital devices, medical equipment, detergents and tires—are becoming the largest drivers of global oil demand, in front of cars, planes and trucks, according to a major study by the... Read more →

KAUST researchers have developed a model that simulates how drilling fluids, or muds, behave and influence the stability of oil wells. Their findings, published in the Journal of Petroleum Science and Engineering, could inform new safety protocols and the design of novel drilling muds. Engineers have spent decades optimizing drilling... Read more →

The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) August Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO) forecasts that US crude oil production will average 10.7 million barrels per day (b/d) in 2018 and 11.7 million b/d in 2019. If realized, both of these forecast levels would surpass the previous record of 9.6 million b/d set... Read more →

The Alaska North Slope (ANS) Basin—a prolific source of US oil production previously limited by a number of barriers to entry including cost and access—is poised to re-emerge as a major source of US energy production, with crude oil output potentially increasing as much as 40% during the next eight... Read more →

The US port district of Houston-Galveston in Texas recently began exporting more crude oil than it imported for the first time on record, according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA). Crude oil exports from the Houston-Galveston port district have increased since the restrictions on US crude oil exports were... Read more →

The amount of water used per well for hydraulic fracturing surged by up to 770% between 2011 and 2016 in all major US shale gas and oil production regions, according to a new Duke University open-access study published in Science Advances. The volume of brine-laden wastewater that fracked oil and... Read more →

Enhanced oil recovery and fracking methods result in large quantities of produced water, which contains, among other things, oil-water emulsions. Rice University scientists have now developed a nanoparticle-based solution that reliably removes more than 99% of the emulsified oil that remains after other processing is done. The Rice lab of... Read more →

by Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com The rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran is becoming increasingly evident in the oil pricing policies of the two large Middle Eastern producers. The two countries are currently reigniting the market share and pricing war ahead of the returning U.S. sanctions on Iranian oil. Saudi... Read more →

US refineries are running at record levels in response to robust domestic and international demand for motor gasoline and distillate fuel oil, according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA). For the week ending 6 July 2018, the four-week average of US gross refinery inputs surpassed 18 million barrels per... Read more →

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com. The strength of the U.S. dollar poses an obstacle to further gains in oil prices. President Trump’s trade war with China, which is still in its early stages, has already battered the yuan. The dollar has gained more than 8 percent against the Chinese currency... Read more →

BP has agreed to acquire a portfolio of world-class unconventional oil and gas assets from BHP. The acquisition will bring BP extensive oil and gas production and resources in the liquids-rich regions of the Permian and Eagle Ford basins in Texas and in the Haynesville gas basin in Texas and... Read more →

GTI (Gas Technology Institue) is leading a high-profile program on Hydraulic Fracturing Test Sites (HFTS) in the Permian Basin, bringing together government and industry to improve recovery, continue enhancing environmentally responsible methods of optimizing production, and lowering costs in the Midland and Delaware Basins. In January 2018, GTI was awarded... Read more →

The Oleo Sponge, a patent-pending technology to clean oil spills invented at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, performed successfully in an experiment conducted off the coast of Southern California. The test, funded by the Palo Alto-based Anthropocene Institute, was meant to validate Oleo Sponge in a... Read more →