Pops wrote:pstarr wrote:Take away the corn liquor, lighter fluid and camping gas and we are still past peak.
Yet we motor on
But hey, I thought the milepost was worth a comment as it is one I never expected, even a year or two ago. With what's left of RU-OPEC announcing cutbacks, I doubt it will take long for the monthly average to catch up.
Could be, but classical supply/demand models would say OPEC+ cuts are a driver for increased USA production and hence higher net exports over time.
Heck if we want to be honest with ourselves before the North Sea fields were discovered and exploited the UK/Netherlands/Denmark and Norway were all oil importers. The the Brent field was exploited and the world shifted allowing them to all be oil exporters for about three decades. Now the UK is firmly back in oil importer category and getting close to net Natural Gas importer status as well. In the USA we did it the other way around, we were net exporters from the beginning however you want to date that up until the Korean War, then we gradually became a net importer with things getting really out of balance by 2001, overlapping the abundance of the Brent field from the 80's and 90's. Starting around 2001 with the declines in Brent and many other places prices crept upward and the USA started exploiting more domestic resources, infill drilling, reworking old fields by guys like ROCKMAN and his investors using more modern techniques on all kinds of old known fields. The long slow decline of the USA got slower and slower, then in 2008 we hit the price tipping point that ignited the fracking revolutions and the USA has been acting much like the UK acted in the 1980's. We now produce more petroleum (call it whatever you want, its chemicals that we sell as oil which is what counts) than we have ever produced before in the 150 years since we were scooping seep oil up for lubrication in the early 19th century.
It took me longer than it should have to admit that LTO from Fracking was a reprieve, at least for some time period. But facts are facts, exploiting LTO has fundamentally changed the production profile of the USA. Despite earlier predictions that we would run out of new drilling sites by 2017 that turned out not to be the case and drilling is still expanding in far more than just the Permian Basin of Texas. It doesn't get a lot of press like it did early on but the Bakkan is still drilling and so is the Utica in Ohio and other basins in other places.
Plugging your ears and going neener neener neener doesn't make the facts go away. The fundamental question now IMO is how long will the LTO last? We will eventually run out of new drilling sites in the USA be that 2025, 2045 or 2065. So will that be the world peak, or will super upgrader technology have improved to the point that exploiting the Orinoco super heavy oil will be economically viable and drop another trillion barrels of crude into the world market just in time the same way the LTO did for the USA/World starting in 2008?
