Recently in Events Category

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.

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.

A few notes from this year's Americas Assembly of The Oil Council in New York.

(Unfortunately, no media breakfast this year; the prior two were interesting affairs that you can read about here and here.)

(With contributions from Platts staff members Sheela Tobben and Leslie Moore Mira.)

Worldwide tightening of bunker specifications was by far the most widely discussed topic at Platts 8th Annual Bunker and Residual Fuel Oil Conference in Houston this week. (Internally, we call this event BOTB...the bottom of the barrel.)

As background, the new International Maritime Organization regulations, effective July 1 of this year Emission Control Areas in Europe ships operating in those waters can burn no higher sulfur than 1%,down from 1.5%S. Those areas affected are the Baltic Sea, North Sea and the English Channel.

The North American ECA is slated to move sulfur fuel levels in most of North America to 1% sulfur from 3.5%-4.5% beginning August 2012, within 230 miles of a port. California has already implemented a 24-mile ECA zone of 1% sulfur.

Day 2 at the OTC, where the Houston weather for May is very un-Houston like, and the lines at the ticket booths are longer than they were a day ago.

The Oil Council, as it did last October, brought together a panel of executives in New York April 21 to meet with the media and talk about pretty much everything. There wasn't one overriding theme, but when industry executives get together in the US these days, shale gas and its impact on so many parts of the business is never far from their minds. 

Here are some of the main points that the panelists discussed. These are a summation of their main thoughts, with direct quotes marked as such:

US natural gas has been a puzzle -- as well as a jaw-dropper -- for the last several years. It has seemingly defied typical supply and demand expectations where cutting back on production of something eventually leads to scarcity and thus more production to bring the market in balance.

The kink in the case of gas is new technology that has caused efficiencies that allowed production volumes from new shale and unconventional plays to exceed most expectations even with less drilling. Optimal well completion techniques and more efficient new rigs, have resulted in soaring per-well yields. And even as E&P companies have switched their focus to oil as oil prices have climbed in the past year, that hasn't necessarily prevented associated gas from cropping up with each well drilled. All that gas eventually adds up to hefty volumes that have tamped down gas prices.