Category Archives: Energy

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, July 1, 2019: 

Two recent reports confirmed the preeminence of the United States in its production of crude oil and its related derivative, natural gas. Earlier this month British Petroleum (BP) released its “Statistical Review of World Energy” for 2019 in which it reported that the United States extended its lead as the world’s top oil producer to a record 15.3 million bpd (barrels per day): 11 million bpd of crude and 4.3 million bpd of natural gas liquids (NGL) in April.

BP added that the United States led all global oil producers by increasing its production by more than two million bpd in 2018, 98 percent of the total new global production.

Friday’s report from the U.S. Energy Information Agency (EIA) overshadowed that from BP, noting that

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, February 20, 2019: 

The report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) on Tuesday merely confirmed what the agency predicted just a week earlier: The shale revolution in the United States will not only keep prices of oil and gas low into the foreseeable future, it will make the U.S. a net exporter of energy within 18 months.

The agency expects shale oil production from the seven major shale formations in the country to set a record in March at 8.4 million barrels per day (bpd). This will push total U.S. crude oil production to nearly 12 million bpd, ahead of both Saudi Arabia and Russia.

Bank of America predicts that

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, November 12, 2018:

Following the emergency meeting attended over the weekend by members of the OPEC cartel and its non-members in Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia’s Energy Minister Khalid al-Falih said “We need to do whatever it takes to balance the oil market.” That goal is indicative of OPEC’s increasing nervousness that it is running out of options to counter increasing U.S. oil production. Last month, the EIA (Energy Information Administration) announced that the United States now leads the world in crude oil production, ahead of both Saudi Arabia and Russia.

For many years, the cartel was able to dictate oil policy and prices globally, bending the world oil markets to the cartel’s needs and purposes. Ten years ago,

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Monday, November 12, 2018:  

In this space a week ago, this writer panned King Hubbard’s “Peak Oil” theory as fracking technology and favorable market conditions for U.S. producers continued to drive world crude oil prices lower. In early October, the price of oil for November delivery was over $76 a barrel. At the market close on Friday, November 2, the price for December delivery was below $63, pushing the oil market close to bear market territory.

The oil market continued its remarkable decline, with December oil futures trading at the close on Friday, November 9, below $60 a barrel.

This has gotten the attention of the oil ministers of OPEC and its hangers-on (like Russia and Oman), and on Saturday they held an emergency meeting in Abu Dhabi, UAE to see what could be done to stop the decline. On Sunday, Saudi Arabia’s oil minister told Oman’s oil minister that, come December, the cartel will cut oil production by a million barrels a day.

Everything was running along smoothly right up through August.

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, November 5, 2018: 

In an interview with CNNMoney in June, Pioneer Natural Resources Chairman Scott Sheffield said he expected U.S. crude oil production to surpass 11 million barrels a day by this fall, making the United States the world’s top oil producer. Right on schedule the Energy Information Administration announced on Thursday that the U.S. oil industry produced 11.3 million barrels of crude oil a day during August, an increase of 416,000 barrels from the previous month and topping production from Saudi Arabia and Russia. That level of crude oil production is more than 2 million barrels a day ahead of August 2017, the largest increase over any 12-month period in U.S. history.

Sheffield told CNNMoney that “we’ll be at 13 [million] very quickly” and predicted that that number could jump to 15 million in a very few years.

On Wednesday U.S. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke told Fox News that officially “today we are the largest oil and gas producer on the face of the planet, rolling through 11 million … on our way to 14.”

In less than 10 years, thanks largely to the development of, and continued improvement to, fracking technology, U.S. crude oil production has more than doubled, from 5 million bpd (barrels per day) in 2008 to more than 11 million today.

This has immediate as well as long-term ramifications that extend far beyond gas prices at the pump.

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Monday, November 5, 2018: 

When M. King Hubbard concluded in 1956 that the world would shortly run out of oil, his theory was adopted by environmentalists and government meddlers as the basis for interference in the energy business.

Hubbard’s theory initially predicted that U.S. crude oil production would peak at around 1970. Revisions to the theory pushed the peak date out to 2000 when U.S. crude would hit 12.5 billion barrels per year and then start its inevitable and irreversible decline.

For 2018, U.S. crude oil production will hit 30 billion barrels. So much for Hubbard’s “peak oil” predictions.

But, as Eric Peters (who blogs at EricPetersAutos.com) laments, government interference based on the discredited “peak oil” theory remains firmly in place: