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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...

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...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Oil prices lurched 5 percent lower on Monday to their lowest since January, taking global benchmark Brent below $50 a barrel as weak factory activity in China deepened a commodity-wide rout. Growing concerns over excess global oil supplies, heavy selling in pumped-up gasoline futures and technically driven momentum trading knocked prices to within a few dollars of the six-year lows touched at the start of this year. U.S. crude had already fallen 21 percent in July, its worst month since 2008 amid mounting evidence of an expanding global glut and a stock market collapse in China,...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Oil sank to six-month lows on Monday with Brent crude falling below $50 a barrel on sluggish U.S. and Chinese economic data and bets for weaker gasoline consumption in the United States after tearaway demand earlier in the summer. Evidence of growing global oversupply and a stock market collapse in China, the world's largest energy consumer, have weighed on oil for weeks, leading in July to U.S. crude futures' largest monthly decline since the 2008 financial crisis. On Monday, the rout deepened as U.S. gasoline fell its most in a day in 10 months. Supply worries...

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.

The Socialist Utopia has come to Venezuela and so has triple-digit inflation. Inflation is soaring at about 65%, murder rates are the second highest in the world, they don’t have food, chocolate,cooking oil, sugar, beer, shampoo, chicken, beef or even toilet paper. Businesses put the blame on the socialist government’s economic policies and the government blames it on everyone else. A number of U.S. movie stars have gone to Venezuela many times to applaud their regime and compare their economy to ours. Sean Penn was one. ... American leftists cheered the Socialist government and the social justice he forced on...

Hope you like increasing prices, everyone! #ForTheMiddleClass https://twitter.com/WSJPolitics/status/627796768328183808 … It’s not like Americans weren’t warned. All in the name of fighting “climate change,” of course. Has that ever really been a barrier for this administration?

The community of Craig is holding its collective breath today, waiting on the feds to decide by midnight whether they will bother to challenge a court decision that threatens to shutter the Colowyo Mine. The Interior Department has gobbled up the entire period allotted to them to decide whether to appeal. We can only hope they have used this time wisely to decide in favor of the 200 plus workers whose jobs are on the line. And the lines in the proverbial sands have been clearly drawn. On one side is the radical environmental group WildEarth Guardians, who brought the...

Craig community leaders hosted a meeting Thursday at Moffat County High School to provide a brief update on the situation at Colowyo Coal Mine, answer questions and facilitate public comment on the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement’s environmental assessment. Ray Beck, Craig mayor, opened the gathering by telling the audience about the economic significance of Colowyo mine’s 220 jobs to Craig and Northwest Colorado. “This is not the time to slow down,” Beck said, emphasizing the importance of community feedback on the development of the mine’s new environmental assessment. When the OMSRE’s recommendation to approve mining plans for...

Oil prices fell on Friday as concern over global oversupply intensified after oil producers’ cartel OPEC indicated there would be no cuts in production despite a huge global oversupply. The fall mirrored a general sell-off in commodities on persistent worries about demand in China, the world’s biggest user of energy and many key materials such as copper. China’s state planner said on Friday a slowing economy must not be allowed to morph into social risks as the volatile Chinese stock market fell again. “All commodities are down,” said Abhishek Deshpande, oil analyst at Natixis. “Commodities face weak demand, excess supplies...

Canada has given oil sands a dirty reputation, but a breakthrough, commercially viable technology has caught the eye of a former Exxon Mobil president who is putting it to use to clean up Utah’s billions of barrels of oil sands. Imagine extracting high-quality oil out of the estimated 32 billion barrels buried in Utah’s oil sands, without creating the toxic wastelands that have resulted from oil sands projects in Western Canada. And imagine doing it at a cost that can still turn a profit in today’s oil price slump. That would be highly enticing to some of the large operators...

At a press briefing yesterday, Speaker Boehner called for ending the oil export ban – an antiquated policy born out of the 1970s “scarcity mindset” that is standing in the way of new jobs, lower gas prices, and stronger support for our allies: “Repealing the U.S. Ban Would Create One Million Jobs” “Repealing the U.S. ban would create one million jobs, help bring down gasoline prices for consumers and be good for allies, Boehner said. … U.S. oil producers hope Congress will repeal the trade restriction, which they say has led to an oil glut that threatens to choke the...

PORTLAND, Ore. – Protesters against Arctic drilling rappelled from the St. Johns Bridge early Wednesday morning to set up an aerial blockade of a Shell oil icebreaker in the port for repairs. "They are creating a human barricade so that the Shell icebreaker cannot get through," said Annie Leonard, the executive director of Greenpeace U.S. "They are prepared to stay up there for days because that's what it is going to take to save the arctic." The 13 Greenpeace protesters suspended themselves from the bridge around 3 a.m. Wednesday. One of them is from Portland. “I think direct action is...

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...

Halliburton has cut nearly 14,000 jobs and Baker Hughes has laid off 13,000 employees since they began trimming their headcounts last year to cope with the oil-market crash, officials said Monday. Those figures, shown in quarterly securities filings Friday and confirmed by company spokeswomen on Monday, are several thousand more jobs than the last time the oil field service companies gave an estimate of their planned layoffs in April. Halliburton’s latest layoff estimate exceeds its April figure by 5,000 jobs, bringing its cuts up to16 percent of its workforce. And Baker Hughes’ estimate is up by 2,500 jobs, up to...

Oil and gas producers in one of the most active drilling areas in the country have had to make concessions to not disturb species such as the lesser prairie chicken and the dunes sagebrush lizard. Now industry officials in parts of Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico may have four other species to contend with: make way for the Cascade Caverns salamander, the Arizona toad, the alligator snapping turtle and the Rio Grande cooter. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced Tuesday it is giving what it calls “status reviews” to the four amphibians and reptiles found in the Southwest as...

The plunge in oil prices last year led many to say that a decline in U.S. oil production wouldn't be far behind. This was because almost all the growth in U.S. production in recent years had come from high-cost tight oil deposits which could not be profitable at these new lower oil prices. These wells were also known to have production declines that averaged 40 percent per year. Overall U.S. production, however, confounded the conventional logic and continued to rise--until early June when it stalled and then dropped slightly. Anyone who understood that U.S. drillers in shale plays had large...