I agree that it is different but not sure which way its going.

In the beginning of the crash the two main factors in my opinion were the end of Quantitative Easing and the decision by SA to produce unlimited.

We seem to be wobbling in the turbulence of those two issues and trying to predict anything is tough.

Story from a year ago on the end of QE

http://www.cnbc.com/2015/01/14/market-madness-started-with-the-end-of-federal-reserves-qe.html

Supposedly, one of the big oil hedge funds liquidated all their longs.

OPEC now considering keeping cutbacks going into 2018.

"On Monday, Saudi Arabia energy minister Khalid Al-Falih said that he expected OPEC and other oil producing nations to extend a global oil supply cut to extend throughout 2017. Falih went on to add that after years of oversupply, oil markets were showing signs of rebalancing. Even with indications of markets rebalancing and an OPEC cut of 1.8 million million barrels per day during the first half of 2017, global supplies remain high. Crude oil prices have slipped back below $50 per barrel.

Falih attributes falling prices to a few factors including low demand season and non-OPEC production increases, especially in the U.S. Despite the recent fall of benchmark prices, Falih sees signs for optimism. "I believe the worst is now behind us with multiple leading indicators showing that supply-demand balances are in deficit and the market is moving towards rebalancing," he said.

One major cause for confidence is the growing demand for oil in Asia. With countries such as Vietnam and the Phillipines growing quickly, Falih believes in the next 25 years Asia will account for close to two-thirds of the world's gas demand.

Other industry leaders share Falih's view that OPEC supply cuts will continue moving forward. Fereidun Fesharaki, chairman of energy consultancy FGE, said, "They (OPEC) are looking at (extending) for nine to 12 months. Six months is not enough as we'll still be well above five years average of stocks."
When asked about the rise of renewables as a cause for concern to reduce fossil fuel demand, Falih seemed untroubled. He expressed confidence that oil demand has not peaked and will not do so anytime soon.

Up a buck this morning, positive storage reports?

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• U.S. West Texas Intermediate futures rocketed above $47 a barrel after government data showed a big drop in the U.S. crude inventories.
• Gasoline demand also recovered from a recent weak spell, driving up U.S. gasoline futures.
• WTI is on track for its best day since OPEC agreed to cut its output.

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http://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/10/oil-prices-surge-as-eia-stockpile-report-eases-market-fears.html

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One needs to look at the pipeline data to gauge ACTUAL production growth, not rely on Goldman...which Goldman does no reporting on this side of the fence.

Probably a lot of my relatives who spend every dollar they make

Venezuela

The guy who makes these:

Anyone on here work for Marathon? Just applied for an engineering position in Houston

SA asks the us to not produce so much

http://dailycaller.com/2017/05/12/saudi-arabia-whines-us-has-too-much-control-over-worlds-oil/

Cepe said:

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SA asks the us to not produce so much

http://dailycaller.com/2017/05/12/saudi-arabia-whines-us-has-too-much-control-over-worlds-oil/

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I would like to know what kind of mental gymnastics they went through to determine high oil prices are better for the prosperity of the world. Try to explain that to some poor guy in India or Bangladesh that lives on less than $1 a day.

Personally, if love it if everybody produced a little less.

Except for the commodity producer who has been enriched by global competition limiting their own output to manipulate prices.

clearly the current price is good enough for at least one commodity producer

thems the breaks

Supply, demand, free market and all that jazz.

I mean how are you going to afford the lifestyle to which you've become accustomed without a low-level cartel in place

cone said:

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I mean how are you going to afford the lifestyle to which you've become accustomed without a low-level cartel in place

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A Texas A&M Petroleum Engineering degree.

APC pulls the plug on Shenandoah. I wonder if this will slow down exploration in the lower tertiary. CVX is all in on it. It will be interesting to see which of the big guys will be the first to use 20K trees.



Contractors well into the design phase of a semi-submersible production facility for Anadarko Petroleum's Shenandoah field in the deep-water US Gulf of Mexico have been told to stop work on the project, delivering a hefty blow to a region desperate for work.

Multiple industry sources said the Shenandoah project has been shelved for the foreseeable future. The stop-work order came within the last two weeks, sources said.

"Shenandoah is shut down," said one source last week. "Anadarko pulled the pin," said another. "It's a dead project," said another.

The decision to not move ahead with the development at this time follows news earlier this month that the latest appraisal well, Shenandoah-6, failed to find the oil-water contact on the eastern flank of the reservoir. A sidetrack of the well also found only wet sands.

Anadarko said in its quarterly operations update that it would halt appraisal activity at Shenandoah as it "evaluates the path forward".

The company is thought to have already sunk more than $1 billion into its extensive drilling campaign at Shenandoah.

The bad result at Shenandoah-6 forced the company to write down the value of the overall asset to the tune of $435 million, including $267 million worth of resource that had been on the books for more than a year.
Chief executive Al Walker said on Anadarko's earnings call that the writedown was "simply accounting methodology" and that the company's view of the asset had not "philosophically" changed.

"In a $50 to $60 (oil price) world, We always felt like greenfield development in the Gulf in particular was fairly challenged," Walker said.

More recently, the company told analysts that it still believes the resource could be developed "in a more favourable commodity price environment", perhaps as a "hub" that incorporates other discoveries in the "mini-basin" such as Coronado and Yucatan.

When asked about industry chatter that the project had been shelved, Anadarko spokesman John Christiansen referred back to statements made in the quarterly reports and conference call.
"I think our statements in these documents are clear," Christiansen said.

Smaller resource
At the very least, Anadarko and its partners are almost certainly looking at a much smaller producible resource than previously envisaged.

Cobalt International Energy chief executive Tim Cutt, whose company owns a 20% stake in the project, said this week that Shenandoah's gross recoverable resource now stands at between 200 million and 300 million barrels of oil equivalent.

While Anadarko has never provided an official resource estimate, Cobalt's estimate is well below what some observers speculated based on a couple of eye-popping appraisal wells that dug up more than 1000 feet of pay. Anadarko at one time floated the idea that the field could ultimately require two host facilities.

After a long evaluation of development concepts for Shenandoah, Anadarko last year finally settled on a semisub hull proposed by SBM Offshore, with Wood Group handling the topsides. The project was thought to be well into the front-end engineering and design phase.

As Upstream previously reported, Anadarko had once considered a 200,000-barrel-per-day facility at Shenandoah, but later reined it in with a 100,000-bpd project in mind.
As the resource base shrank, the plan was scaled down to a 60,000-bpd facility. Sources said that plan too has now been halted.

Fewer opportunities
Without a major project like Shenandoah in the pipeline, contractors will likely need to position themselves for new opportunities, even as the number of future deep-water development projects in the US Gulf continues to shrink.

Industry observers were split on the ultimate factor in Anadarko's decision to stop work on Shenandoah, over and above the recent appraisal disappointment.

Many blamed the complexity of the Lower Tertiary reservoir, where pressures can exceed 20,000 psi and producibility is a challenge.

"20k technology is lagging facilities, so they shut it down," one source said.

Other sources said the blame falls squarely on the current pricing environment and on the four- to five-year cycle time before Anadarko would see a return on its multi-billion-dollar investment in a newbuild semisub.
The realities of deep-water mega-projects makes them hard to compete in a portfolio stuffed with relatively low-cost shale and deep-water tieback opportunities, such as Anadarko's.

"It's purely a matter of what makes the most sense for deploying capital in today's market," said one source. "There's so much runway left before you start seeing any kind of return."

"20k technology is lagging facilities, so they shut it down," one source said."

That's interesting. I wonder which category of technology is lagging. It's not across the board.

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I wonder which category of technology is lagging. It's not across the board.

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I would venture that the "lacking technology" was drilling equipment. My experience on the vendor side is that it wasn't so much the technology not being capable, it's that because there was no track record of this high pressure drilling the requirements were very much over and above what had been done in the past. Therefore, there required more and more redundancy which caused the weight of everything to grow. Which then introduced it's own problems. In my opinion, some of these scenarios were overblown. But the simple fact is why would you invest billions in a high risk area when there are plenty of investment opportunities in areas with much less risk.

i was talking to a friend that is a project engineer for BP deep water. he said liability of being the operator is the single biggest reason for the death of deep water.