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In March 1999 the cover of The Economist carried the bold headline "Drowning in Oil". In December 1998 the price of Brent crude oil had dipped below $10 per barrel to then lie just over that mark. By October 2003 the situation in the oil market had changed and the Economist now carried the headline "The End of the Oil Age". At that time the price fluctuated around $30 per barrel which was an increase of 200 %. Low prices are usually an indicator of excess supply and high prices are the opposite.

Since it has the world's largest reserves of oil, Saudi Arabia has been the main player in the oil market since the 1960s. The figure above shows that nation's oil production. As a reaction to the war in Israel, Saudi Arabia closed down production from a number of its oil wells at the beginning of the 1980s.

On New Year’s Eve the players in the fracking industry popped their champagne corks but it was not to celebrate wonderful success as they had done the year before. Rather it was to drown their sorrows. The USA’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) has now released this year’s first Drilling Productivity Report so we can now summarise what happened with fracking for shale oil and shale gas during 2015.

One the map you can see the areas in the USA that accounted for 92 % of the increase in oil production and 100 % of the increase in natural gas production during 2011-2014. These are the areas included in the Drilling Productivity Report .

Dear friends of ASPO

We have had some problem with our website and the problem is that the construction of the site is too old. ASPO needs to construct a new site.

The next problem is that we need financial support to run the site and also for making a new site.

With a new site I hope we can be very active again.

If anyone can help with support in one way or another please send an e-mail to:
aspopeakoil@gmail.com

Kjell Aleklett
President of ASPO

Since 2007 when we published our article, ”A crash program scenario for the Canadian oil sands industry” a visit to Fort McMurray and the areas where oil sands are mined has always been high on my wish list. On my current trip I passed Calgary on the way to Toronto so I finally got an opportunity to visit the oil sands. The flight from Calgary became an interesting introduction to the industry. It was on a small aircraft with around 50 seats and about 40 of the passengers were presumably workers on their way back to Fort McMurray after a week’s leave. A three week session of work on the tar sands awaited them. This report is a description of my trip and does not take a position for or against the mining of oil sands.

During the weekends from May until and including autumn the Oil Sands Community Alliance (OSCA) in Fort McMurray organizes round trips to interesting places. I was able to put together my own trip with their help.

In June 2014 BP presented its latest Statistical Review of World Energy. Now, in March, they have used these statistics to make estimates of future energy use. The results were presented in BP Energy Outlook 2035. This year, BP has made a special analysis of North America, i.e. Canada, the USA and Mexico. But before BP presented their predictions they made a disclaimer. The question is what value BP’s future scenarios have in the light of the disclaimer. Does BP really believe its scenarios describe our future? In any case we will certainly see references to their scenarios in the media. I suggested that you download a suitable version and study it. (Download).

During the period November 2014 to March 2015 I visited several of the 26 counties that cover Eagle Ford. Due to the heavy traffic made up of thousands of large trucks I was especially careful when driving around to study fracking. It is frightening to read that 272 people died in traffic accidents in the Eagle Ford area during 2014. 42% of all the traffic accidents in Texas occurred in Eagle Ford. Note that the area is not densely populated, and that all large cities are located outside of the Eagle Ford.

Since last autumn there has been overproduction of oil in the USA compared to what the market, OPEC and Saudi Arabia had planned. I have previously discussed how there is insufficient storage for this excess oil. It is fairly easy for the producers in the Middle East to close the taps and reduce production but closing the “fracking tap” is a completely different story. Bloomberg has published an article describing how, at the moment, the fracking tap is being closed in the USA, “Watch Four Years of Oil Drilling Collapse in Seconds”.

“The crash in oil prices kicked off intense debate over when, and how, American producers would react. So far they’re still cranking out oil, but there are signs that a slowdown is looming.

1. Background & Objectives

The journal addresses all aspects of the evolving ‘Oil Age’, including physical, economic, social, political, financial and environmental characteristics.
Oil and gas are natural resources formed in the geological past and are subject to depletion. Increasing production during the First Half of the Oil Age fuelled rapid economic expansion, with human population rising six-fold in parallel, with far-reaching economic and social consequences. The Second Half of the Oil Age now dawns.
This is seeing significant changes in the type of hydrocarbon sources tapped, and will be marked at some point by declining overall supply. A debate rages as to the precise dates of peak oil and gas production by type of source, but what is more significant is the decline of these various hydrocarbons as their production peaks are passed.
In addition, demand for these fuels will be impacted by their price, by consumption trends, by technologies and societal adaptations that reduce or avoid their use, and by government-imposed taxes and other constraints directed at avoiding significant near-term climate change.

Discoveries of new oil and gas reserves dropped to their lowest level in at least two decades last year, pointing to tighter world supplies as energy demand increases in the future. Preliminary figures suggest the volume of oil and gas found last year, excluding shale and other reserves onshore in North America, was the lowest since at least 1995, according to previously unpublished data from IHS, the research company. Depending on later revisions, 2014 may turn out to have been the worst year for finding oil and gas since 1952...

Read more: http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/def8d8f4-b532-11e4-b186-00144feab7de.html#axzz3RtlQi036