OPEC, for some quiet moments..

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The company said it would cut capex to $20 billion in 2015 from $22.9 billion in 2014. It maintained its quarterly dividend at 10 cents per ordinary share.

BP quarter results heavy losses - Business Insider

Crude-oil futures extended gains Tuesday, with prices rallying on speculation that a sharp decline in U.S. drilling activity will result in supply cuts.

Oil prices shoot higher as investors worry about supply cuts - MarketWatch

In this life nothing is certain. Therefore I am not declaring, absolutely, that we are at peak oil, only that it is a near certainty. But I am putting my reputation on the line in making the claim that the period, September 2014 through August 2015 will be the year of Peak Oil. Below are my reasons for making this claim.

Why Peak Oil Is Finally Here

BP Plc boss Bob Dudley is very bearish on the price of oil. He says this feels the same as 1986, when oil slumped from $30/bbl to $10/bbl and didn’t recover until Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. “The fundamental supply and demand does remind me of 1986 a bit, where we could go into a period in this decade of lower oil prices,” Dudley said a Bloomberg TV interview, adding prices may stay in a range below $60 for as long as three years. “It will be a long time before we see $100 again.”

BP CEO sees no hope of $100 oil for ‘long time’ amid glut

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The USA and Canada are responsible for about 120% of the increase in world oil production since 2005, even though they did not begin their grand ascent until 2009. Canada’s over 400,000 bpd increase in September is responsible for that last spike upward. But can this continue?

Why Peak Oil Is Finally Here

The Texas Petro Index, a composite index based upon a comprehensive group of upstream economic indicators, declined for the second straight month in December to 309.5, according to the sponsor of the index, the Texas Alliance of Energy Producers. “We know to a certainty, that the TPI will continue to decline for months into the future – almost surely through all of 2015 and perhaps into 2016 – chronicling an industry contraction that will be of significant magnitude,” said Karr Ingham, the Texas Alliance economist who created the TPI.

Texas Petro Index begins decline, industry contraction will be significant

Wood Mackenzie's Russia upstream research team have assessed the most significant events of 2014 impacting Russia's oil and gas sector, including the Ukraine crisis, the collapse of global oil prices, a shift to conventional domestic production and closer ties with the East, identifying the key areas to watch this year.

Wood Mackenzie identifies Russian upstream events to watch in 2015

China’s CNOOC plans to boost production this year despite the downdraft in oil prices causing the company to cut capital expenditure. CNOOC’s net production target for 2015 is in the range of 475-495 MMboe, of which production from China and overseas accounts for approximately 67% and 33%, respectively. The net production targets set for 2016 and 2017 are around 509 MMboe and 513 MMboe, respectively. The estimated net production for 2014 is approximately 432 MMboe.

CNOOC aims to raise output despite spending cut

U.S. drillers idled oil rigs for an eighth week as crude prices headed for their longest stretch of declines since 2009. The oil rig count dropped by 94 this week to a three-year low of 1,223, Baker Hughes Inc. said on its website Friday. Drillers have idled 352 oil rigs in eight weeks. Natural gas rigs increased by three to 319 and one miscellaneous rig was added, bringing the total count down 90 to 1,543.

Rigs seeking U.S. oil drop for eighth week, Baker Hughes says

Jereh has successfully completed the construction of China’s first shale gas liquefaction plant in Sichuan, China, with a capacity of 2.47 MMcfd of LNG, the company has announced.

Jereh completes China’s first shale gas liquefaction plant

ConocoPhillips, the third-largest U.S. energy producer, reported a fourth-quarter loss as new output failed to make up for the worst oil-price crash since 2009... The company will reduce expenditures by more than 30% to $11.5 billion this year on drilling projects from Colorado to Indonesia.

ConocoPhillips reports loss as oil crash crimps shale gains

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Oil plunged the most since November, ending the biggest rally in six years, as a U.S. supply glut worsened. The U.S. benchmark slumped as much as 9.4%. Crude stockpiles climbed 6.33 MMbbl in the week ended Jan. 30 to the highest level since Energy Information Administration weekly data started in 1982.

Oil’s biggest rally since 2009 stalls as U.S. supply glut grows

Abu Dhabi, the desert emirate holding about 6% of the world’s oil, cut export prices for its crude for the seventh consecutive month and to the lowest since 2009 amid a global price slump. Murban crude, its main grade, sold in January for $46.40/bbl, or 23% below December’s level, according to an emailed statement from Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. Murban hasn’t sold for less since February 2009, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

Abu Dhabi cuts oil prices to six-year lows amid global rout

The fall in oil prices has set the tone for a challenging 2015, says Wood Mackenzie, which will affect E&P activity across Asia Pacific’s (APAC) entire upstream sector. Gero Farruggio, Head of APAC Upstream Research, says, “Even with challenges, we expect an eventful year with several positive developments on the political and fiscal front. These will not only act to soften the blow but renew interest in upstream exploration in the region.”

Asia Pacific set for renewed interest in exploration, Wood Mackenzie says

We're getting some clarity now on oil and how things will unfold. It looks like the companies with the most commodity exposure and the weakest balance sheets are going to be able to get by with some joint ventures like the one Linn Energy  (LINE) did with Blackstone's  (BX) GSO unit -- where for $500 million the finance guy gets the upside -- or the one Continental Resources'  (CLR) Harold Hamm did with Rich Kinder, where for $3 billion Kinder Morgan  (KMI) got the best pipe out of the Bakken.

Jim Cramer on the Markets: Picture Is Getting Clearer on Oil - TheStreet

Investors should be on the lookout for energy stocks, according to Morgan Stanley's chief market strategist. Adam Parker told CNBC's "Squawk on the Street" on Friday that the time to buy energy stocks is now. "Energy stocks are cyclical," he said. "All seven times they've gone down this much in the past, they've subsequently outperformed six months later."

Why you should buy energy stocks now: Expert

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Oil prices have rallied off their post-crisis lows, in a move that may mark the bottom of the rout as producers' cutbacks begin pinching supply, some analysts said. "We've seen the lows for the year," Daniel Morgan, global commodity analyst at UBS, told CNBC, citing producers' steps to decrease counts and aggressively cut capital spending. "Financially, the oil price just got sold off too aggressively and so was poised for a comeback."

Has oil finally bottomed?

Goldman Sachs just dared to go even further against the US government by suggesting that the new oil order may be a blessing in disguise for Russia's oil industry. Simply put, the impact of the lower oil price and sanctions on the Russian economy increase the importance of oil industry tax reform, which could provide stimulus for upstream investments and commercialisation of the country’s vast oil reserves.

Goldman Busts The Narrative: The New Oil Order Is "Blessing In Disguise" For Russia | Zero Hedge

Inpex Corp. announced Wednesday that the Inpex-operated Ichthys LNG Project had started drilling at the Ichthys gas-condensate field, about 200 km off the Western Australian coast. The first development well was spudded Tuesday by the project’s development drilling rig, Ensco-5006, which recently arrived at the field after undergoing major upgrades in Singapore.

Inpex kicks off Ichthys LNG development drilling campaign

Saudi Arabia will continue to dip into its cash reserves and use its ability to borrow to temper the ongoing storm in oil markets, the country's finance minister told CNBC.  Ibrahim Abdulaziz Al-Assaf said Thursday that the country had been preparing for a period of cheap oil.

Saudi Arabia OK with cheap oil for 'some time' - Yahoo Finance

Let’s look at other drops in oil over the past 30 years. Below is a monthly chart of crude oil (WTIC). The yellow bars are the size and duration of the current fall in oil since June 2014. Three other instances look similar in that the drop was swift and without a pause (marked with stars: 1986, 1990 and 2008). Two others took twice to four times as long to unfold (1997 and 2000).

What To Look For When The Price Of Oil Has... | The Fat Pitch

Here in the MarketWatch newsroom, we’re allowed to pester our senior markets writer, Bill Watts, with questions on a regular basis. But the best questions come from our readers, which is why Watts took to Reddit Friday morning to answer your questions via an AMA (short for Ask Me Anything). Here are 12 of the best questions you asked:

12 brilliant responses to all the oil-related questions you need answers to - MarketWatch

This volatility could be set to continue, with one oil expert warning on Thursday that the growth in U.S. output would not start to slow until mid-2015 at the earliest.

Brent, WTI crude oil volatility hits industry as ‘price war’ weighs

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Rosneft, Russia’s largest oil producer, is set to cut spending by 10% this year, Igor Sechin, the company’s CEO, has said.

Rosneft to cut spending 10% this year, Sechin says

Back in May 2008, nobody — especially regulators — had a clue about what was causing crude oil prices to spike to $100-per-barrel-levels, and mostly everyone was inclined to either blame “China” or “speculators” or some combination of the two. But Michael Masters, a portfolio manager at Masters Capital Management, had a simple proposition. In the Senate committee hearings organised to figure out exactly what was going on, Masters testified that it was his belief that a new class of investor — one he dubbed the passive “index speculator” — had bulldozed his way into the market and distorted the usual price discovery process.

Michael Masters on speculation, oil, and investment | FT Alphaville

The production of rigs is not linear, with approximately 80% of the nations production coming from approximately 20% of the wells, and therefore the sharp drop in active rigs will not be a measure of actual production being taken off line.

Fewer oil rigs doesn’t mean less oil - Quartz

The cutback in exploration and even production, and the increase in demand as a result of the oil price crash will work slowly to rebalance the market, at a considerable. Some even argue that the cutbacks will pave the way for much higher prices down the road. The reality is, short-term almost all adjustment works through the price, quantities only adjust slowly, producing wild and sudden swings in the oil price in reaction to shocks. But the underlying trend for the oil price is up, and it's more important battles lie elsewhere, no matter how spectacular these swings are.

The Coming Oil Shock? | Seeking Alpha

After predicting correctly in 2012 that a supply surplus was likely to emerge in the world petroleum market because of the growth of production capacity, many people have asked what I think will happen now and in the near future. For a number of reasons outlined below, I believe we are facing an extended period of structurally low oil prices, which will in turn bring geopolitical risks that create new market uncertainty. This view comes from a a bottom-up analysis of the market rather than the top-down, econometric models generally used by organizations such as the International Energy Agency, investment banks, and think tanks. Here I will simply sketch out what I see as the elements that we must watch carefully in the near future, to avoid errors or oversimplifications.

www.energyintel.com/pages/worldopinionarticle.aspx?DocID=875679

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"Toward a Truly Global [Gas] Market." That was the headline that launched World Gas Intelligence on its way in January 1990 -- and it remains a never-quite-achieved aspiration for a fuel that then looked to be an almost sure winner in the great international energy game. What has changed for natural gas in the 25 intervening years? Or put another way, why hasn't the industry lived up to that happy prospect and is there a chance it will yet do so?

www.energyintel.com/pages/worldopinionarticle.aspx?DocID=874854

However, this prompt display of confident competence, impressive as it has been, can't obscure for long the deep-seated problems and even threats facing the kingdom. Trying times lie ahead for Saudi Arabia, possibly bringing a gradual erosion of its global influence and standing.

www.energyintel.com/pages/worldopinionarticle.aspx?DocID=874977

FT Alphaville has written before about how the pronounced collapse in the price of oil appears very reminiscent of the disintegration in the value of a certain subprime financial asset; both have been swift, disorderly and self-reinforcing. A new report from The Bank for International Settlements emphasises the latter dynamic by drawing a connection between the vast sums of money energy companies have borrowed from investors in recent years as well as the retreat of traditional dealers from certain commodities-related transactions. The new dynamic has imparted a swift and sudden forcefulness to the recent price action in the crude price that goes beyond the effects of a simple change in production and consumption of oil.

BIS: There’s an the oil-debt-dealer nexus | FT Alphaville

Saudi Arabia went to great lengths last week to deliver a message of continuity after the death of King Abdullah, even taking the bold step of naming a deputy crown prince to lock in the line of succession for the foreseeable future. Oil Minister Ali Naimi kept his job, a clear vote of confidence in the kingdom's oil policy for now. But many believe that Naimi, who turns 80 this year, will not stay in his post for too long. And when he vacates that role, which he has held for 20 years, there will be an opportunity to tweak the uncompromising policy. Even if he stays, there are reasons to believe the kingdom may have to reformulate its approach, which has caused prices to fall faster and further than officials were expecting.

www.energyintel.com/pages/worldopinionarticle.aspx?DocID=874712

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America’s legacy Permian Basin, the biggest of all oil fields in the U.S., was hit hardest by drillers this week retrenching amid the worst price collapse in six years. The Permian, stretching across parts of Texas and New Mexico, lost 37 rigs drilling for oil to 413, Baker Hughes Inc. said on its website Jan. 6. The U.S.-wide count slid 83 to 1,140, marking the ninth straight week of declines and bringing the total to the lowest since Dec. 2, 2011.

America’s biggest oil field hit hardest by idled drilling rigs

Statoil deepened cost cuts and halted dividend growth as Norway’s biggest energy company struggles to withstand a plunge in oil prices. The company will raise spending cuts by 30% to $1.7 billion from 2016 and lower capital expenditure to $18 billion this year from an earlier target of $20 billion, the Stavanger-based company said.

Statoil deepens spending cuts as oil price rout saps profits

A fourfold increase in energy companies’ debts since 2003 may have deepened last year’s oil-price rout as firms delayed curbing output and sold futures contracts to hedge against the slump, the Bank for International Settlements said. Energy companies’ outstanding debts rose to more than $800 billion this year from less than $200 billion in 2003, the Basel-based institution said in a report on Saturday. Sinking oil prices weakened the value of assets used as collateral by producers and compelled them to sell more of their output on futures markets, it said.

Oil firms’ debt spiral may have added to price rout in BIS view

The oil industry’s billions in spending cuts are paving the way for a price rebound that will make the best shale producers attractive investments, commodity hedge fund manager Andrew J. Hall told investors. The current rout is distinguished from the crash in 1986—which left crude trading below $25/bbl for four years—because OPEC countries today have almost no spare capacity. This time, shale oil will soon be needed to make up for production declines all over the world, pushing U.S. prices to as high as $65/bbl, the head of Astenbeck Capital Management wrote in a Feb. 2 letter obtained by Bloomberg News.

‘God’ of crude oil trading sees oil rally benefiting shale since this isn't ‘86

Crude just had the biggest two-week gain in 17 years, but it’s still about 50 percent cheaper than it was in June. The situation is volatile, and forecasts are all over the place — from $30 a barrel predicted by the president of Goldman Sachs to as high as $200 a barrel seen by the head of OPEC. So what’s going to happen next? Here’s a sampling of predictions from the last two weeks

These Experts Know Exactly Where Oil Prices Are Headed - Bloomberg Business

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The oil price crash has meant slashed budgets, staff layoffs and mothballed projects for big producers, but oil traders will celebrate their best market for years this week.

Oil trader favorable market conditions - Business Insider

The world needs only meager demand growth for oil to eliminate the current supply glut. As the following slide from a recent Whiting Petroleum (WLL) investor presentation shows, just maintaining the current global demand growth trajectory would require 7 million additional barrels of oil per day of supply by the end of the decade. It won't take long to sop up the oversupply in the market as long as demand maintains its historical growth rate of 1% per year. Should demand for oil increase to 2% we'd need an extra 14 million barrels of oil per day by the end of the decade. For perspective, North Dakota's Bakken shale play, where Whiting Petroleum operates, only produces about 1 million barrels of oil daily, so the world would need 14 more Bakken-sized plays to meet that increased demand. The other thing to keep in mind is that U.S. oil demand has picked up in recent years -- up 4% (about 750,000 barrels per day) in less than two years ending in September

Why oil price plunge could be short-lived

SandRidge Energy Inc, a U.S. oil and gas producer, plans to slash its rig count in Oklahoma and Kansas by about 75 percent to eight rigs, according to a document obtained by Reuters.

Oil company SandRidge is going to shut down 75% of its rigs - Business Insider

The recent surge in oil prices is just a "head-fake," and oil as cheap as $20 a barrel may soon be on the way, Citigroup said in a report on Monday as it lowered its forecast for crude.

Citi: Oil Could Plunge to $20, and This Might Be 'the End of OPEC' - Yahoo Finance

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We saw one of the most significant shifts in a long while for energy markets last week. With a key pipeline opening that will radically change global flows of crude oil. The project in question is the China-Myanmar oil pipeline. Which Chinese state media said on Thursday has now opened for test runs.

This New Project Changes The Global Oil Market

And it has saved an estimated $17 billion from the lower cost of oil imports in 2014, according Wang Tao, UBS’s chief economist. What’s more, China’s savings on oil and the products that rely on it give can be invested inexpensively in its strategic energy reserves, and keep inflation and producer prices low, according to Kenneth Courtis, the chairman of Starford Holdings. “In the wildest dream of great news for the Chinese economy, no one could have dreamed of such a positive scenario,” he said.

One Region That Could Benefit Most From Low Oil Prices

The United States will remain the world's top source of oil supply growth up to 2020, even after the recent collapse in prices, the International Energy Agency said, defying expectations of a more dramatic slowdown in shale growth.

U.S. oil output 'party' to last to 2020: IEA - Yahoo Finance

Russia will be the biggest loser from the current downturn in oil prices as the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) seizes back a bigger share of the world crude market, the world's top energy watchdog has said.

Top energy watchdog: Russia will be the big loser of the oil crash - Business Insider

OPEC made the deepest cut to its forecasts for 2015 global oil-supply growth since it first published them in August as U.S. producers lead a slowdown in drilling after last year’s price collapse. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries lowered its estimate for non-OPEC supply growth this year by about 400,000 bopd, the biggest reduction since the forecast was introduced in August. The U.S. led with a cut of 130,000 bopd while estimates for Colombia, Canada and Yemen were also trimmed. The group said it may boost global demand forecasts beyond this month’s slight increase amid rising U.S. gasoline use.

OPEC cuts U.S. oil-supply growth forecast after price rout

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The North American shale oil revolution played a large part in the oversupply and crash of the oil market. Specialists vary widely in their predictions of where oil is headed next. We argue that with an increased role for shale production, the underlying market dynamics are altered and the oil price swings will be less violent in the future.

American Shale Is The New Swing Producer | Seeking Alpha

"Yet supplies so far remain abundant, and it will take time for investment cuts to make more than a relatively small dent on production," the IEA said, noting that timing the recovery in oil prices was a key issue.

Oil market rebalancing 'could take years': IEA

* Libya violence, Nigeria tanker attack raise supply worries * China's cut in bank reserve requirement could boost oil demand * Saudi Arabia sends mixed signals with physical crude prices

UPDATE 9-Oil up over 4 pct on Libya raid, China easing; volatility seen