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 →

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com. When reports emerged that India and China are in talks about forming an oil buyers’ club, OPEC was probably too busy with its upcoming June 22 meeting to concern itself with that dangerous alliance. Now, it may be time for it to start worrying. “The... Read more →

During the last three years, companies operating in the Permian basin have drilled much longer laterals and used substantially more complex well completion design in their newer wells with the aim of reaching higher initial production (IP) rates. Well lateral lengths in the Permian have increased in average by more... Read more →

by Nick Cunningham of Oilprice.com. The U.S. dollar has jumped to its strongest level in nearly a year, raising questions about how a strong greenback could act as a drag on debt and oil demand in much of the world. The U.S. Federal Reserve announced another rate hike a few... Read more →

by Michael Sivak. Gasoline is one of the products refined from crude oil. Thus, the price of crude oil should have a strong influence on the price of gasoline. However, the retail price of gasoline includes other costs as well. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates that in the United... Read more →

April saw the US produce a record 10,543,000 barrels per day (MBD) of oil, according to data from the American Petroleum Institute. The first four months of this year also saw US petroleum demand average 750,000 barrels a day above the same period in 2017 despite higher prices. Total petroleum... Read more →

People who live closer to fracking sites are more familiar with and more supportive of hydraulic fracturing, while those who live in proximity to areas of higher oil and gas well density are more familiar with but not necessarily more supportive of the practice, a new study from Oregon State... Read more →

Shell Offshore Inc., a subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell plc, made its final investment decision for Vito, a deep-water development in the US Gulf of Mexico with a forward-looking, break-even price estimated to be less than $35 per barrel. This decision sets in motion the construction and fabrication of a... Read more →

Short-term oil demand is still growing strong and will continue to do so through the end of 2020 despite the market’s increasing focus on electric vehicles and the forecasted future plateau in oil demand, according to new analysis from IHS Markit, a global business information provider. Five-year rolling aggregate global... Read more →

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced that the government will grant no further offshore oil and gas exploration permits. Existing permits will not be affected. Energy and Resources Minister Dr. Megan Woods said that this year’s block offer will be limited to onshore acreage in Taranaki alone. The onshore... Read more →

A team of Idaho National Laboratory (INL) researchers, with colleagues at Georgia Tech, has pioneered an electrochemical process that could eliminate the need for high-energy steam cracking. In an open-access paper in the RSC journal Energy and Environmental Science, the researchers suggest that their study provides a disruptive approach for... Read more →

Bahrain’s National Oil and Gas Authority (NOGA), alongside international consultants DeGolyer and MacNaughton, Halliburton, and Schlumberger, have provided new details on the Kingdom’s largest discovery of oil and gas (earlier post), with tight oil amounting to at least 80 billion barrels, based on a P50 resource estimate. P50 is a... Read more →

Researchers at Mississippi State University are developing technology that would alert pipeline managers about leaks as soon as failure begins, avoiding the environmental disasters and fuel distribution disruptions resulting from pipeline leaks. The biosensor uses exoelectrogenic bacteria in an anode that survive on organic matter and a photo or autotrophic,... Read more →

Oil production growth from the United States, Brazil, Canada and Norway can keep the world well supplied, more than meeting global oil demand growth through 2020, but more investment will be needed to boost output after that, according to the International Energy Agency’s latest annual report on oil markets. Over... Read more →

Global levels of the hydrocarbons ethane and propane in the atmosphere have been underestimated by more than 50%, according to a new study by a team of scientists from Europe and the US. When ethane and propane—the most abundant non-methane hydrocarbons (NMHC) in the atmosphere—mix with nitrogen oxides from vehicles... Read more →

Exxon Mobil Corporation added 2.7 billion oil-equivalent barrels of proved oil and gas reserves in 2017, replacing 183% of production. ExxonMobil’s proved reserves totaled 21.2 billion oil-equivalent barrels at year-end 2017. Liquids represented 57% of the reserves, up from 53% in 2016. ExxonMobil’s reserves life at current production rates is... Read more →

By Nick Cunningham of Oilprice.com Oil prices fell back suddenly over the last few trading sessions, dragged down by some forces beyond the oil market. The steady decline of the U.S. dollar has helped drive up crude prices for weeks, but that came to an abrupt halt last week. A... Read more →

ExxonMobil’s newly released Outlook for Energy: A View to 2040 anticipates that global energy needs will rise about 25% over the period to 2040, led by non-OECD countries. While the mix shifts toward lower-carbon-intensive fuels, the world will need to pursue all economic energy sources, the report says. The Outlook... Read more →

by Nick Cunningham of Oilprice.com Shale companies continue to drill at a frenzied pace, adding rigs and breaking US oil production levels with each passing week. Yet, the oil production is becoming increasingly geographically concentrated. Not only is the Permian basin accounting for much of the new oil production in... Read more →

Shell Offshore Inc. announced one of its largest US Gulf of Mexico exploration finds in the past decade from the Whale deep-water well. The well encountered more than 1,400 net feet (427 meters) of oil-bearing pay. The Whale discovery is located approximately 200 miles (322 kilometers) southwest of Houston in... Read more →

New energy research from business information provider IHS Markit has identified more than five billion barrels of oil equivalent (BOE) in numerous smaller, previously bypassed, or underperforming reservoirs outside North America that offer oil and gas operators a shorter-cycle path to production than new, frontier projects in undeveloped areas. The... Read more →

ExxonMobil plans to triple total daily production to more than 600,000 oil-equivalent barrels by 2025 from its operations in the Permian Basin shale oil region in West Texas and New Mexico. Tight oil production from the Delaware and Midland basins will increase five-fold in the same period. The company said... Read more →

By Nick Cunningham of Oilprice.com Echoing the criticism of too much hype surrounding US shale from the Saudi oil minister last week, a new report finds that shale drilling is still largely not profitable. Not only that, but costs are on the rise and drillers are pursuing “irrational production.” Riyadh-based... Read more →

In its latest edition of the Short-Term Energy Outlook, the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) forecasts that US crude oil production will average 10.3 million b/d in 2018—the highest annual average production in US history, surpassing the previous record of 9.6 million b/d set in 1970. EIA also forecasts that... Read more →

Eni’s proprietary Eni Slurry Technology (EST) is able to convert refining residues entirely into high-quality light products, eliminating both liquid and solid refining residues with significant environmental benefits. Eni has now sold the licence and basic engineering project to the Chinese company Sinopec for the construction of a refining plant... Read more →

ExxonMobil Corporation announced positive results from its Ranger-1 exploration well, marking ExxonMobil’s sixth oil discovery offshore Guyana since 2015. The Ranger-1 well discovery adds to previous world-class discoveries at Liza, Payara, Snoek, Liza Deep and Turbot, which are estimated to total more than 3.2 billion recoverable oil-equivalent barrels. In October,... Read more →

The US Department of Energy (DOE) has selected six projects to receive approximately $30 million in federal funding for cost-shared research and development in unconventional oil and natural gas (UOG) recovery. The projects, selected under the Office of Fossil Energy’s (FE’s) Advanced Technology Solutions for Unconventional Oil and Gas Development... Read more →

The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) and Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) have announced two new research projects, which will receive a total of $250,000 in funding. The first project will research a new technique to mitigate cracking and corrosion in piping and related equipment used by the oil... Read more →

Human emissions of the potentially harmful trace metal vanadium into Earth’s atmosphere have spiked sharply since the start of the 21st century due in large part to industry’s growing use of heavy oils, tar sands, bitumen and petroleum coke for energy, a new Duke University study published in the Proceedings... Read more →

The Gulf Research Program (GRP) of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine is awarding $10.8 million to six new projects to develop new technologies, processes, or procedures that could result in improved understanding and management of systemic risk in offshore oil and gas operations. The greatest risk in... Read more →

Total petroleum deliveries in October moved up by 1.1% from October 2016 to average 19.9 million barrels per day, according to data from the American Petroleum Institute (API). These were the highest October deliveries since 2007. Compared with September, total domestic petroleum deliveries, a measure of US petroleum demand, decreased... Read more →

by Nick Cunningham for Oilprice.com Oil prices appear to be stuck in the $50s per barrel, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t serious supply risks to the market. An unexpected disruption could occur at any moment, as has happened in the past, leading to a sudden and sharp jump in... Read more →

According to the US Department of Energy (DOE) Energy Information Administration (EIA), in 2015 total petroleum production exceeded all US transportation sector petroleum consumption. The EIA expects petroleum production to be greater than transportation consumption through 2040. Including non-petroleum sources such as ethanol, the production will exceed transportation demand by... Read more →

Honeywell UOP’s Callidus Technologies business began operation of China’s only facility capable of testing flare emissions for volatile organic compounds (VOCs). The test center in Luoyang, Henan Province, aids customers that are working to reduce emissions of VOCs in industrial flare systems and improve flare operation. The Callidus Luoyang Combustion... Read more →

With the sharp and largely unexpected increase in the long-distance movement of domestically produced crude oil, ethanol, and natural gas since 2005, a number of concerns have arisen about the safe transport of these hazardous materials, particularly in relation to railroad track defects, rural communities’ emergency response preparedness, and the... Read more →

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh have found that the air pollution and greenhouse gas costs of shipping crude by rail are nearly twice as large as those for oil pipelines. Further, their estimates of air pollution and greenhouse gas costs are much larger than estimates... Read more →

by Irina Slav for Oilprice.com While OPEC mulls over further steps to once again support falling oil prices, tech startups are quietly ushering in a new era in oil and gas: the era of the digital oil field. Much talk has revolved around how software can completely transform the energy... Read more →

by Irina Slav for Oilprice.com Say what you will about offshore oil and gas exploration, but it’s still alive and kicking—high production costs and all. The latest demonstration of the viability of deepwater projects, even in the post-2014 oil industry era, comes from none other than Brazil. On Wednesday, the... Read more →