Posted on 04/04/2013 8:46:36 AM PDT by thackney
In case you had any doubts, two reports released this week confirm that the oil and gas economy in Texas is still hot.
Drilling permits issued in January and February were up 10 percent over the same period in 2012, according to economist Karr Ingham, who created the Texas Petro Index.
The number of permits issued in February actually slipped by about 3 percent over 2012 numbers, Ingham noted.
But the Railroad Commission issued 3,722 permits during the first two months of the year, “the strongest start to a year in the entire history of the TPI,” he said.
Karr developed the index a decade ago to track trends for the Texas Alliance of Energy Producers. He reported in January that Texas oil production rose by almost 100 million barrels in 2012 over the previous year, to the highest level in two decades. It was the fifth consecutive year with an increase.
This week he reported a “stunning” increase in oil and gas industry employment in Texas indicated in an annual revision in state employment data, which was concluded in March.
After the revision, the Texas Workforce Commission estimated that 267,000 people worked in the upstream oil and gas industry at the end of the year, he said. That includes drilling and service companies.
The Texas Independent Producers & Royalty Owners Association released a similarly upbeat report looking at trends in employment, wages and other economic factors.
Its State of Energy Report counted total oil and gas industry employment in Texas at 379,800 during the first half of 2012. Nationally, the industry employed 971,200 people in the first half of 2012, the report said.
While the Texas Petro Index relies on the Texas Workforce Commission for its employment data, the Texas Independent Producers & Royalty Owners Association report drew its employment data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, spokeswoman Kelli Way said.
The average national industry wage was $107,200 in 2012; that compares with an average private sector wage of $48,900, according to the report.
“Texas continues to lead the country in oil and gas production, innovation and employment, due in part to our favorable business and regulatory climate,” Ed Longanecker, president of the Texas Independent Producers & Royalty Owners Association, said in a statement.
Among other highlights that Ingham noted in the February installment of the Texas Petro Index:
Crude oil production totaled an estimated 50.6 million barrels, about 8.3 percent more than in February 2012. Crude oil wellhead prices averaged $91.90 a barrel, 7 percent less than February 2012. Natural gas production was about 528.7 billion cubic feet, a year-over-year monthly decline of 12.5 percent. Natural gas prices averaged $3.27 per thousand cubic feet, up about 26.3 percent. The Baker Hughes rig count averaged 833, down 8.9 percent.
Oil is booming in most areas from exploration / production / pipeline up to the refinery.
Natural Gas drilling is way down, but the pipeline and Natural Gas treatment plants are still trying to catch up and work is good in those areas.
Natural Gas production did not rise last year and the total production fell going into 2013.
****Natural Gas drilling is way down, ****
There is a glut of Nat gas on the market. The price is very low, so no need to drill till the price rises.
Great news, but I find it curious...
Why couldn’t this have happened when GWB was in office? The Bush family is in oil and are from Texas if I remember correctly. And W spoke of energy independence at one time as well.
By contrast, Obama supposedly hates anything but green energy (and hates anything good for America for that matter), but oil is bigger than ever in places like Texas and North Dakota.
What am I missing?
Things are honestly starting to go crazy in west Texas. When I started getting offers in the mail almost daily to buy my mineral rights for massive amounts of money I KNEW something was up.
So I took a road trip out to west Texas 2 weeks ago... and MAN is something certainly up!!
North of Ozona .... Is like a bee hive of activity!! It looked to me like they were building the infrastructure necessary for massive amounts of oil and gas to be efficiently moved via pipelines out of the area. And just South East of Pecos new wells are being actively drilled left and right...
Something BIG is going down.
Here we have a regime bent on impoverishing the United States, and along comes an oil and gas boom that can keep our economy going and revitalize it.
God does indeed work in mysterious ways.
yep, the price of gas is so low right now that it’s cheaper to just burn it off than to transport it.
The whole sky in parts of west Texas was lit up with the fires of rigs burning off gas two weeks ago when I went to check on my holdings out there.
You are missing the leap forward in Technology that occurred recently that has opened up field (or re-opened them up) that were previously not producing or were under producing.
Midland/Odessa has been humming for about 3 years now. No end in sight either.
It’s BOOMING out there regardless of what Zer0 and his regime have tried to squelch it.
I suspect that rising demand, combined with the fast production decline curves, combined with fallen number of rigs after gas, and also combined with the need to first tie wells into pipelines to gas treatment plants prior to reaching the market is going to bring us back to significantly higher prices before we ride the roller coaster down again.
The political pressure to block export leaves too many unwilling to invest in more Natural Gas supply, fearing even greater overrunning of demand at profitable prices.
Muchof the new natural gas supply is from shale or other tight formations. These are far more expensive wells to complete than those common a decade or two in the past.
The technology advancement of horizontal steerable drill was just beginning to grow in commercial operation when combined with hydraulic fracturing during most of the Bush Administration years. It was really taking off as he left office.
Only for the new wells. Permitting has a limited time to tie those in until the penalties get large including loss of operating permits. It varies by state.
What you are missing is that innnovation and implementation of new production technology have nothing to do with the current (or past) occupant of the White House. As long as there is money to be made, creative and risk tolerant companies and individuals will find a way to make it. The occupant of the White House is unfortunately the baneficiary of these events. People who do not understand the industry (such as yourself) for some reason draw a causal connection between the current politicians in power and economic strides made by private industry in spite of their policies.
But just give the EPA a couple of more years and they will figure out a way to screw it up.
Politicians get paid off by the Saudis not to make the USA energy independent. That’s why they all get so wealthy when they move to DC and nothing is ever really done to move us in that direction. BO lives like a Saudi prince. Payoffs must be huge. Course I have no proof of this, it’s just my humble opinion.
My sisters and I got a notice that a geological survey for gas and oil will be done on our land in Lee county soon. Hoping for good news.
Yesterday, the Boston NPR station had an interview with some solar and wind people, and they were all bitching about how fracking and the new oil boom were cutting into their business opportunities. The hosts of the show did plenty of their own hand-wringing and made their disapproval very clear.
It was hilarious listening to them squirm.
The other factor that was left out by the other Freepers was the price of oil has been pretty steady in that $75-100/bbl range. The price was all over during the Bush administration.
I do not believe this technology is profitable under $50/bbl.
Thackney would know better than I.
One of the things I hear holding backing drilling up in ND is just the lack of storage/pipeline to put the oil. They can drill the wells faster than they get build the infastructure to move the product to market. There is only so much pipeline capacity available. Also, you can only load so many rail tank cars in a day on the BNSF or CPRS railroads.
I do not make a casual connection. Bush is/was an oil man, was he not? 9/11 happened on his watch and had the (albiet temporary) support of the people and Congress to get off our dependence of ME oil.
He knew the industry well and how critical energy independence was as a national goal. There were and are tons of money to be made in oil, on top of windfall tax revenues for the spendthrifts in gov’t.
The only thing that could have stopped it was either technology was not advanced enough, which you allude to already, or the political will to overcome the environmentalists was not strong enough.
At any rate, gov’t policies do matter and can make or break companies or stiffle, if not grind to a halt, business development. That is not to say gov’t can repeal the laws of supply and demand. But they sure can throw a wrench in the works.
I see from a quick glance at some of the other posts that I had not read previously that technology has much improved in recent years.
That answers most of the questions for me.
BO lives like a Saudi prince. Payoffs must be huge. Course I have no proof of this, it’s just my humble opinion.
You don’t need proof.if the accusation fits it must be true.At least that’s the mentality of the leftwing nuts.
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