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 →

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 →