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U.S. oil fell to a six-year low Tuesday, pummeled by China’s plummeting currency and a growing conviction that global demand can’t catch up with an unrelenting supply of crude. Oil, in tumult for more than a year, continued a summer swoon that took it below the lows it plumbed this spring. Production is still near historic highs in both the U.S. and the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, new data show. It indicates suppliers around the world are still mired in a fight for customers that ramped up output and took down prices nearly 60% from the highs of...

Cash-strapped Venezuela is pushing for an emergency OPEC meeting and joint coordination with Russia to stem a tumble in oil prices, President Nicolas Maduro said on Tuesday night. "We're working towards a special OPEC meeting, in coming days we'll announce .... We're making contacts with OPEC governments," Maduro said during an hours-long televised broadcast. "We're evaluating the possibility that a very high ranking OPEC meeting be called, and that in coordination with the Russian Federation, President Vladimir Putin, we can advance in taking a series of actions to defend the oil market in the face of this latest fall," he...

Oil production from the Eagle Ford Shale in South Texas will dip again in September, according to the latest report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Production of crude oil and the light oil condensate is expected to slide by 56,000 barrels daily, to around 1.48 million barrels per day. It will be the sixth straight monthly drop for Eagle Ford output. The industry has been hit hard by falling crude oil prices, with energy companies drilling and completing fewer wells. Oil prices were higher than $100 per barrel last summer but have been trading around the $45-level recently. Production...

Shipments of crude oil out of the Midwest region (Petroleum Administration for Defense District 2) to other U.S. regions have steadily increased as a result of pipeline reversals and rail transport. Rail movements out of the Midwest contributed to the region becoming a net shipper of crude oil. Without these rail movements, the Midwest region would still be a net recipient. The Midwest started to ship more crude oil to other regions than it received from those regions for a few months in 2013 and on an annual basis in 2014. The most recent Petroleum Supply Monthly, which contains data...

The oil market is signaling that prices could stay lower for longer, delivering a fresh blow to hard-hit energy exploration-and-production companies. Benchmark U.S. oil futures for September delivery are nearing the six-year low hit in March. But contracts for delivery in later years have taken an even bigger hit, with prices for 2016 and 2017 already trading below their March lows. That indicates that investors, traders and oil companies see the global glut of crude oil persisting beyond this year. Companies making long-term investment decisions rely on the prices of futures contracts one or more years in advance. Producers trade...

The director of the EPA’s Office of Transportation and Air Quality today shot down the notion that the agency has already decided to implement a 54.5 mpg corporate fleet average for 2025. The average is officially proposed, but the decision to raise, lower or leave alone the 54.5 corporate fleet fuel economy average for 2025 won’t be made until after a review in 2017 and 2018. The decision is due in April 2018. “There is a perception out here that the decision is already made,” Chris Grundler said at the CAR Management Briefing Seminars. “That is wrong. The EPA administrator...

Texas power users broke a record for the second time in two days this week after electric demand peaked at 68,912 megawatts on Thursday between 4 and 5 p.m. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which runs the state’s electric grid, said the preliminary estimate for power demand during that hour was the highest it has ever recorded. Thursday’s peak was just ahead of the record set on Wednesday, when demand registered 68,538 megawatts. ERCOT noted that one megawatt is enough to power 200 homes during peak demand. Much of Texas is under a heat advisory this week, with triple-digit...

NRG Energy (NYSE: NRG) said in its Aug. 4 quarterly Form 10-Q report that it and partners are aiming for a late-2016 commercial start-up of a seminal carbon capture facility (CCF) at NRG's coal-fired W.A. Parish power plant in Texas. In July 2014, NRG, through its wholly owned subsidiary Petra Nova Holdings LLC, sold 50% of its interest in Petra Nova Parish Holdings LLC to JX Nippon, a wholly owned subsidiary of JX Nippon Oil & Gas Exploration Corp. As a result of the sale, NRG no longer has a controlling interest in and has deconsolidated Petra Nova Parish Holdings...

Gross inputs to U.S. refineries exceeded 17 million barrels per day (b/d) in each of the past four weeks, a level that had not previously been reached or exceeded in any given week since EIA began publishing the data in 1990. The rolling four-week average of U.S. gross refinery inputs has been above the five-year range every week so far this year (Figure 1). The record high gross inputs reflect both higher refinery capacity and higher utilization rates. Lower crude oil prices and strong demand for petroleum products, primarily gasoline, both in the United States and globally have led to...

Tuesday was a busy announcement day for the US independent E&Ps. After processing Pioneer Natural Resources' plans to ramp production on a $90-oil-price growth trajectory (see our take here), the operational updates released by Devon, Oasis and Cimarex sounded like an echo. Each of these three are also planning for production expansion in spite of oil price weakness. Several times in the past couple months, we've noted the grit of the independents showing up in the one-off datapoint or the operations outlook. This week, we are hit with a flood of new evidence that the US independents are shirking their...

Located in the rear of the Penn Square Mall in Oklahoma City, this quite small commercial bank made a name for itself in the high-risk energy loans in the late 1970s and early 1980s during the Oklahoma and Texas oil boom. The bank's assets grew 15-fold (to $525 million) and its deposit base rose to $475 million from $25 million in the eight-year period ending 1982. On the latter point, most of the bank's deposits were derived from loans from other financial institutions funded by uninsured and high-interest-rate jumbo certificates of deposit. With more than $1 billion of syndication sales...

Is $20 oil Possible? This question has been asked, and answered, in previous Oilpro posts. Yes, $20 oil is possible. Will it happen? I don't know. But it is worthwhile to understand why a $20 price is not out of reason. Further, it might be instructive to understand why recent oil price commentators are suggesting a low-thirties number. A year ago it was almost impossible to get an article published that talked about $60 oil. That price was believed to be completely unreasonable. Now we are flooded with commentaries speculating on "How low will it go?", with $30-40 numbers quite...

The Obama Administration is often accused of being sluggish in granting permits for projects to ship liquefied natural gas (LNG) to countries that do not have a free trade agreement with the U.S. Critics claim it has thus denied the U.S. a historical opportunity to become a leading natural gas exporter on par with Russia and Qatar. Whether ten approvals out of forty applications in four years is sluggish or not is a matter of perspective. But the debate on the pace of approvals has masked a much more important fact: American gas is no longer desired abroad, no matter...

The German energy mix has been radically changed in recent years, predominantly driven by two forces: a desire to expand renewables’ market share (a task accomplished by generous state subsidies called feed-in tariffs), and an aversion to nuclear power following the 2011 Fukushima disaster. Within Germany these changes have had a number of perhaps unforeseen and certainly unfortunate consequences, including jacked-up power bills for businesses and households and, somewhat bizarrely, an increased reliance on the particularly dirty type of coal called lignite. But the ripple effects of Berlin’s energiewende are expanding past national boundaries, and, as Politico reports, Germany’s neighbors...

On Monday President Obama announced the final "clean power plan" regulation for greenhouse gas emissions from electric generating plants, the centerpiece of the broader Climate Action Plan being implemented by the Environmental Protection Agency. Amid the many assertions about the looming climate crisis confronting "the planet," about which more below, one central parameter was conspicuous by its absence. To wit: What effect on future temperatures---that, after all, is the supposed benefit of the rule---would this regulation provide? Interestingly enough, the president did not tell us. Nor did the EPA provide an estimate of temperature effects so obviously central to the...

Moody’s Investors Service says it expects more U.S. oil companies to default on risky corporate debt over the next few months as banks tighten lending standards and as contracts that locked-in higher crude prices for future production start to expire. Oil producers in the second quarter accounted for seven of the nation’s 15 high-yield debt defaults, a three-year quarterly high. The credit ratings agency said its oil and gas liquidity stress index — a measure of corporate financial weakness in that sector — rose to 10.4 percent in June, up from 3.8 percent a year ago. “We expect that the...

The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) final Clean Power Plan will seek to tamp down the nation’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from the power sector by 32% from 2005 levels by 2030—about 9% more ambitious than its original proposal. The first-ever final national standards to limit CO2 from power plants, to be released today—”the biggest, most important step we’ve taken to address climate change,” said President Obama—give states more time develop and tailored plans. State plans are now due in September 2016, but states that need more time can make an initial submission and request extensions of up to two years...

A Senate panel has approved energy legislation that would lift the 40-year-old ban on crude oil exports and open some areas of the Outer Continental Shelf to oil and gas exploration. Republican Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, chairman of the panel, championed the plan to lift the restrictions. It passed by a party-line vote of 12-10. Murkowski said lifting the ban would turn the U.S. into an energy superpower.

New plants coming online are set to drive industrial natural gas growth forward by more than three percent in the next two years, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said in an analysis Wednesday. Industrial facilities, which include methanol and fertilizer plants, consumed an average of 21.0 billion cubic feet per day of natural gas in 2014, up 24 percent from 2009. By the end of 2015, that figure is expect to rise by another 3.4 percent to an annual average of 21.7 billion cubic feet per day. In 2016, the EIA predicted another 3.9 percent gain to 22.5 billion cubic...

The CEO of Anadarko Petroleum Corp. says it’s still unclear when his company should go back into growth mode across U.S. shale plays. And that’s not necessarily because of volatility in the oil market, but rather because oil field service companies haven’t cut prices for equipment and other work deep enough yet. “Even with a tremendous amount of hardship that service providers have gone through in the first half of the year, we as an upstream company still don’t have the margins we had a year ago,” Anadarko CEO Al Walker said in a conference call with investors Wednesday. Analysts...