November 2011 Archives

The release of the monthly US export/import numbers is starting to draw attention from a wider range of the media. The release Tuesday of export/import numbers from September is proof of that, as it was highlighted in various media around the country.

The US was a net product exporter in September, with product exports of 3.123 million b/d, and product imports of 2.203 million b/d.

But we've long felt that the number that counts the most is the net import dependency. It didn't move significantly. It was 8.051 million b/d, down slightly from the 8.074 million b/d of August. Still, that September figure is still the second lowest since the US net import dependence began declining from its all-time high of about 13.4 million b/d in August 2006.

Just a couple of years ago, this prediction for US oil production would have sounded preposterous. But Tudor Pickering Holt's chief energy strategist now thinks the number could grow from the current level of 5.7 million b/d to more than 7 million b/d in the near future.  He actually said it out loud recently in an interview with Platts Oilgram News.

Negotiations under the auspices of the United Nations produced the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. It was a watershed event, marking the first international agreement curbing emissions of greenhouse gases from industrial countries.

The Protocol mandated a five-year first-commitment period setting levels of emission reductions, starting in 2008 and ending December 31, 2012. Thus began a decade-and-a-half countdown to negotiate and ratify "a new international framework [by 2012] that can deliver the stringent emission reductions ...clearly indicated as needed," according to the UN's climate change secretariat.

Indonesia used to be a major exporter of oil. It hasn't been in that position for more than five years, and its decline in production has resisted efforts to be reversed. But have those efforts been adequate? In this week's Oilgram News column "Petrodollars," Platts' Meghan Gordon -- normally based in Washington, but who recently spent a month in Asia -- discusses what might be needed for significant change.

Republican Presidential candidate Michelle Bachmann made a few remarks on ethanol last week, caught on video, remarkable only that she may be on to something without even realizing it. (You may need to scroll down among other videos to find Bachmann).

A pro-ethanol speech during the Presidential campaign in Iowa is never newsworthy. But this time, it's being given against a backdrop of the likely end to the ethanol blenders' credit, to be replaced only by what's already in place: higher renewable fuel standards, even as US gasoline consumption continues to plummet.

European nations scrambling to secure their gas supplies have made some big advances in recent weeks. The UK's largest household gas supplier, Centrica, signed on November 21 a $20 billion, 10-year gas supply deal for imports from Norway's Statoil.

Meanwhile, political leaders from Russia, Germany, France and the Netherlands gathered in the German coastal city of Lubmin November 8 to celebrate the inauguration of the first line of the Nord Stream project.

Twenty-five years ago, consumer had a wide array of choices in personal computers. An electronics store might stock IBM PCs, Apple IIs or Macs, the TRS-80, Commodore 64s or Amigas, Atari 1200s or, in the UK, Acorns and Amstrads, all running different technologies and operating systems.

Today IBM is out of the personal computer business, and consumers essentially have a choice between various PC clones and Macs.

The endless creativity of the market may make Keystone XL unnecessary.

That was the unstated yet clear message delivered Tuesday to the New York Energy Forum by Martin Tallett, president of ENSYS, a research firm that worked for both the Department of Energy and the Department of State on TransCanada's Keystone XL application. A final decision on the project, which needs State Dept. approval to cross the border from Canada to the US, has been deferred to 2013 by the Obama Administration.

China's oil demand, which has been showing signs that its strong growth rate might be waning, turned in a sharp upward growth rate in October.

You can read about the results of our monthly survey here.

In the latest edition of "Oil Matters," the joint Platts/Oil Council podcast, John Gerstenlauer, COO of Gulf Keystone, sat down with Platts' Richard Swann to discuss the company's operations in the Kurdistan area of Iraq. The interview was conducted at the Council's World Assembly in London. He focuses not only on Gulf Keystone's activities, but also the recent ExxonMobil deal in that region. You can listen to it here.

The archive of otheer "Oil Matters" podcasts can be found here.

On the day that it was announced that the Seaway Pipeline was going to be reversed, opening the possibility of a rebalancing of US inventories away from the overloaded Cushing, Oklahoma hub, the EIA reported that overall US crude inventories declined last week.

The two aren't related at all, but clearly, analysis of that weekly data is going to be significantly different once 150,000 b/d of pipeline capacity from Cushing to the US Gulf is opened early next year. It will be a lot different once that capacity gets up to 400,000 b/d.

You can read Platts analysis of this week's numbers here.

Here are some of the questions we'll be pursuing regarding the reversal of the Seaway Pipeline, announced earlier this morning as part of the sale by ConocoPhillips of its 50% Seaway stake to Enbridge Energy Partners.

The price of carbon emissions has fallen in Europe. Does that mean the system is failing, or does that mean it's working? In this week's Regulation and the Environment column from Platts Oilgram News, Frank Watson looks at the issue.

Some immediate thoughts on the delay of the White House/State Department acting on the Keystone XL pipeline.

Chesapeake Energy's November 2 announcement that it planned to transport ethane out of Appalachia and to Gulf Coast did not please West Virginia's Commerce Department Secretary Keith Burdette.

The timing and scale of the restart of Libya's oil sector after this year's civil war is one of the key factors likely to influence oil prices in the coming months, and the International Energy Agency thinks production is picking up more quickly than people had been anticipated.

Count on the United States Marines. One might forget to look there for visions of the energy future, but... comes a reminder: email from Camp Lejeune, the Experimental Forward Operating Base, ExFOB.

It's about "wearable electric power systems."

As Tokyo prepares for Christmas, a very big holiday here, Jose Sergio Gabrielli de Azevedo showed up in Japan's capital with what he wanted Santa to bring him. It was a lot more than 12 drummers drumming and five gold rings.

The Petrobras CEO has been making a grand tour of Asia the past two weeks, speaking and holding media briefings in Singapore (at Singapore International Energy Week), South Korea and Tokyo.

On Thursday, Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman Gary Gensler left a Senate hearing room and was met by a bank of television cameras and an anxious press scrum roughly three times the size he typically faces after hearings and agency meetings.

Gensler had just testified on excessive speculation in commodity markets and the CFTC's new position limits regime, a very big deal in certain circles, but a complete afterthought for most reporters Thursday.

Saudi Arabia is synonymous with oil. But as Platts' Dubai editor Tamsin Carlise writes in this week's "At the Wellhead" column in Platts Oilgram News, the company's signature achievement this year will be its contribution to the natural gas boom that is going on worldwide.

Two scholars at the Center for Strategic and International Studies have a really sharp analysis out on the drama surrounding TransCanada's Keystone XL pipeline.

Senior fellows Sarah Ladislaw and David Pumphrey write that the Obama administration's task of making a national interest determination on the project has become impossibly fraught given the level of controversy. And it hasn't handled the challenge well, they argue.

Shale has quickly grown a paradox complex: For industry, it's a newly tapped crude and gas bonanza that has already begun to reverse the nation's oil fortunes. For part of the the public, it's a mysterious new source of hydrocarbons with a method of extraction -- fracking -- that possesses more dangers than benefits.
 
Belatedly, the government is being sought as an arbiter of sorts, to dispel misinformation and to ensure safe extraction. At the federal level, the EPA is in the process of hammering out rules that govern fracking. But at the state and county level, the rules of the game remain a little less certain. Such was the case recently in California, which has the unusual position of being one of the most environmentally-regulated states in the country, but also very much a big oil producer.

Platts this week revealed the Platts Top 250 Global Energy Company Rankings. Some of the observations about what the survey revealed were discussed in a recent edition of Platts Commodity Pulse video, which can be viewed here.

And an addendum: Platts' Vandana Hari discusses the Top 250 with CNBC India here.

It would seem Republicans seeking election to the White House are looking to ride the coattails of the US oil and gas industry. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and current Texas Gov. Rick Perry are both saying the US needs to boost oil and gas production and the Obama administration needs to get regulations out of industry's way for that.

But, does the industry need the help of the politicians as much as the politicians may need help from, or want to hitch a ride with a resurgent industry?

What is the purpose of the EU's much vaunted Southern Gas Corridor and of this week's Azerbaijan-Turkey agreements in particular?

There was a time just a few years ago, when the answer to the broader question was simple: the Southern Corridor was intended to get gas to a European Union where demand was soaring, domestic production was falling and there was a fear of enforced over-reliance on Russian imports. But today the emphasis is far more on getting gas into one particular corner of Europe: the South East.

Crude stocks were up, gasoline stocks were up, distillates were down...a lot. Want some more information on this week's Energy Information Administration inventory report? Read our analysis here.

Nobuo Tanaka seems to enjoy speaking more freely now that he's no longer head of the International Energy Agency. In that role, reporters would parse his every word for clues about possible movements in oil prices and supply.

At Singapore International Energy Week, Tanaka proclaimed on a range of issues Monday in a way he almost certainly would have avoided when he was executive director of the west's energy watchdog.

If there is one thing the renewable fuels industry is full of, it's dynamism.  And ideas -- lots of them. 

A whole tankful of ideas were presented at Platts' sixth annual Next Generation Biofuels conference this week where a handful of innovative tech companies outlined plans to turn all sorts of non-food crops and wastes into fuels.

Platts' Singapore-based managing editor Shailaja Nair was on the BBC today, talking about the impact of a new resource tax being levied in China. You can see it here. 

There are six refineries in the world better than all the others.

That's the conclusion of Solomon Associates, which has an ongoing benchmarking of the world's refineries determined by a variety of tests on operational and financial performance. Those benchmarks include Solomon's Energy Intensity Index, a cost efficency index, measures of operating efficiency and the refinery's return on investment.