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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31827 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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Updates on Oil and Gas

In the old place I started a conversation about rising oil and gas prices. Several people responded at the time that it was due to policy, like Biden cancelling the keystone pipeline and pressuring the adoption of green technologies. The theory was that the Biden Administration wanted to keep prices high to effect a transition to green technology. At the time I argued that it seemed very unlikely that Biden wanted gas prices high, and that these regulatory factors were an insufficient explanation for price spikes/production gluts: Obama cancelled offshore drilling and pushed green tech too and yet oil production doubled under him. @Iconochasm, who I think is no longer with us, made a prediction that oil would fall significantly anyway because fossil fuel companies would react to Biden’s opposition.

As a follow up on that prediction, in the year since this conversation oil production in the US has shot up and looks on pace to soon reach its previous heights before the Covid collapse, with prices falling correspondingly. Now I see articles like “U.S. Crude Oil Production Rebounds In January: EIA”, “America is going through an oil boom — and this time it's different”, and “U.S. Crude Oil Output Expected to Hit New Record Highs in 2023”:

U.S. crude oil production is expected to average 12.4 million barrels per day in 2023, surpassing the previous record of 12.3 million barrels per day in 2019. These forecasts, offered by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, include increased production in the Permian region and the Federal Offshore Gulf of Mexico.[1]

The U.S. is on track to recover all the decreases in production that occurred during the Covid-19 pandemic, when demand for oil collapsed along with its price. The low price of oil caused energy companies to slow production and close their least profitable wells, resulting in an 8% drop in oil production for 2020, the highest annual decrease on record. Following the easing of travel restrictions and a rebound of global demand, U.S. oil output is close to surpassing pre-pandemic levels…

The bulk of the growth in U.S. oil production has come from the Permian region, which spans parts of Texas and New Mexico and accounts for about 40% of U.S. oil output and currently produces 5.7 million barrels per day. The other major source of growth is the Federal Offshore Gulf of Mexico, where several large projects have come online in the past few years, producing 1.8 million barrels per day.

In addition to boosting domestic production, the U.S. is expanding its access to new oil resources in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico. In March 2023, the Biden administration approved a controversial drilling project in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, known as Willow. The project, initiated under former President Trump and faced legal challenges from environmental groups, is expected to produce up to 160,000 barrels per day of oil at its peak and generate $10 billion in revenue for the federal government over 30 years.

A few weeks later, the Biden administration announced plans to hold an auction for a lease sale of more than 73 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico, which could yield up to 1.1 billion barrels of oil and 4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas over the project’s lifetime

It’s gotten so pronounced that environmentalist groups have even started critiquing the Biden Administration (1, 2, 3) for surpassing even Trump in their zeal for fossil fuels:

Federal data show the Biden administration approved 6,430 permits for oil and gas drilling on public lands in its first two years, outpacing the Trump administration’s 6,172 drilling-permit approvals in its first two years…

Nearly 4,000 of the Biden permits are on public lands administered by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s New Mexico office, followed by 1,223 drilling permits in Wyoming, and several hundred each in Utah, Colorado, California, Montana and North Dakota.

Will the outlook stay rosy? I have no idea. As I argued in previous posts I think regulatory decisions are probably less impactful than the broader global markets, and investments in new productive capacity remains low for that exact reason. So a lot of the future probably hinges on stuff like the Ukraine War and the decisions made by OPEC. Still, coupled with the fact that Biden tapped the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to depress prices, I think this largely confirms that Biden was certainly not driven by a desire to crush oil production and keep prices high for Americans. Like most Presidents, he wants voters to be happy with him.

My understanding is that it takes a significant amount of time for exploration projects to go from approval, through construction, to production. To what extent are current production levels indicative of investments made 5-10 years ago, and approvals sought 3-4 years ago? (Honest question, I don't know the industry well enough to say off the top of my head or with only cursory googling).

Similarly, should we expect the number of permits granted by the Biden administration to have an immediate impact on production numbers?

And are all permits created equal - e.g. if current production increases are centered in shale fields, are those permits more or less impactful than the permits being granted now?

My understanding was that it takes at least 10 years to get a fully functioning mine up for instance. And that’s after discovery and vetting. I can’t imagine it’s any easier for oil expeditions.

I've heard from Peter Zeihan that fracking wells are easier and quicker to get up and running than other types of operations, but I can't remember whether it's on the order of months or years.

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