March 2010 Archives

Media agencies from around the globe have descended on beautiful Cancun, Mexico, this week to cover the two-day summit of the International Energy Forum, which began Monday. Cancun has been a wonderful host, and reporters are enjoying their time at the lovely Moon Palace resort, hard against the Caribbean Sea.

The IEF's treatment of the media here leaves much to be desired, however.

One byproduct of the economic recession was a notable drop to virtually zero of initial public offerings by onshore E&P companies. That was probably par for the course, given the drought of investment capital that plagued the energy industry last year.

But at least for certain types of upstream companies, funding appears to be coming back, and the biggest beneficiaries could be small operators in oil-rich play, particularly the Bakken Shale, found in North Dakota, Montana and southern Canada.

A plan this year by pipeline operators, including Buckeye Partners, to bring forward the start date for moving up the usual variety of summer, low-RVP gasoline to the Northeast may have inadvertently kicked off an early start for trading in similar grades. But the early trading isn't in pipeline grades; it's in the far bigger quantites found in barges and cargoes.

OPEC's meeting in Vienna March 17 ended as expected, with the cartel maintaining its existing output target of 24.845 million b/d. Oil prices around $80/barrel removed any potential drama from the gathering.

OPEC's 12 ministers will be raking in a few thousand air miles this month as they prepare to gather in Vienna on March 17 for their regular consultations  ahead of the second quarter before heading to the Mexican resort of Cancun for a major confab with major consuming nations and oil executives at the end of March.

It's a hard life for some.

Oil producer club OPEC this week estimated that its 12 members pumped an average 29.356 million b/d in February -- 116,000 b/d higher than the 29.24 million b/d estimated by the International Energy Agency and 46,000 b/d more than the Platts estimate of 29.31 million b/d but 134,000 b/d below the US Energy Information Administration's 29.49 million b/d.

The highest estimate of production from the 11 members bound by quotas -- Iraq does not participate in output agreements -- also came from the EIA, which put the figure at 27.04 million b/d. OPEC's own estimate came in at 26.81 million b/d, Platts's at 26.75 million b/d and the IEA's at 26.7 million b/d.

Can the poor village woman in a remote part of India who has to walk longer distances to get her daily load of firewood for cooking blame ExxonMobil or Chevron or Shell for her hard life?

Yes she can. going by the class action suit filed by Hurricane Katrina victims against big oil companies, blaming them for global warming and ultimately the storm that killed so many and left many more destitute and homeless.

Cambridge Energy Research Associates sets its big Houston-based annual meeting in three parts: Oil Day, Gas Day, and Power Day (which actually goes into a second day).

Tuesday was oil day. You never would have known it.

Whatever condition Nigeria's President Umaru Yar'Adua is presently in, the fact that he is yet to be seen or heard from directly has revived concerns of a leadership battle just two weeks after Vice President Jonathan was installed as acting president.

Remember that rebound we've been expecting for the US land rig count now that the industry's financial turmoil has stabilized? Well, it appears to be happening faster than many expected, according to some recent research by Credit Suisse analyst Arun Jayaram.

Among other things, Jayaram found that a 14% rig-count boost from fourth quarter of 2009 during just the first half of the first quarter already matches the percentage gain for the entire fourth quarter of last year when compared with the third.