June 2010 Archives

Putting numbers on the likely levels of future oil supply and demand isn't easy at the best of times, and the Macondo disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is making the art of forecasting even more complicated than normal.

Earlier this week, the International Energy Agency released its forecasts for the period to 2015. This is something the IEA does every year and what a difference a year makes. This time last year, the agency was warning that sharp cuts in upstream spending would result in world crude production capacity growing by just 4.2 million b/d in the period to 2014 rather than by the 5.5 million b/d forecast just a few months earlier.

Americans don't seem to have agreed on much in the past ten years, at least when it comes to government. But a rare unanimous US Senate vote on Thursday showed that there is apparently one thing Americans can agree on: punishing Iran.

Amid brightening prospects for increasing unconventional gas production and supply, energy ministers from the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation countries meeting recently recognized the need to explore ways to secure supplies coming from streams other than conventional gas.

It was arguably the first recognition of the need to develop unconventional gas at any energy ministerial talks, which underlines the potential of unconventional gas to meet the demand that is now being met by LNG, particularly in Asia.

US oil executives can work to distance themselves from BP's Macondo disaster all they want, but they will still be joined at the hip when all the debate boils down to answering THE ultimate question that now faces offshore drilling.

There is no room for additional oil on world markets, OPEC said this week, warning that supply growth has "more than overwhelmed" growth in demand.

The oil cartel has revised its forecast of demand for crude produced by its 12 members this year downward by 70,000 b/d to 28.77 million b/d, which means that the 29.28 million b/d Platts estimates it pumped in May a lot more oil than the market needs.

From the welter of information that any web presence seems capable of self-generating, I'm led to believe that the bulk of our readers are US-based. If so, the fact that there's a World Cup imminent may well have escaped your attention.

For the rest of the world (explanatory note, a World Cup differs from a World Series by involving, well, other countries), football fever grips participant nations in many different ways. Across the UK, it often reopens a perennial debate.

It's a debate that sees cold, hard economics combining with thorough scientific effort to test the commitment of impassioned fans. And there's a question of good taste thrown in for good measure. At stake is the issue of flags.

As the who's who of the global shipping industry get together in Athens for the 22nd edition of Posidonia 2010 -- which is the world's most prestigious shipping trade event -- those following the tanker industry will be looking hard at the health of the sector from the Greek capital.

The internet is rife with BP hate groups. A "Boycott BP" group on Facebook has nearly 400,000 fans. Another group called "Stop the oil spill by stuffing BP executives into the leaking pipe" has 121,400 fans.

If there is an official BP fanpage on Facebook, it would take some serious searching to locate it since there are currently over 500 groups with BP in the name, most of which are BP hate groups.

The blowout of the BP-operated Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico last month has raised countless questions about the future of offshore drilling, regulation, safety and just how much built-in system redundancy should be required on already highly-functional equipment.