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Notes -
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”:
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:
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?
Time to production varies based on the type of project. In the Permian you can go from a drawing on a napkin and some capital to physical production in less than a year. In the gulf of mexico, it's more like 4-5 years (and the capital costs are insane).
To be clear, this is a change from the way things were prior to say 2010. Time from spud to completion in Permian is down to ~6 months. Used to be more than a year.
Thank you for the insight!
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