OPEC, for some quiet moments..

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It’s not exactly the Pike’s Peak gold rush of 160 years but with crude prices on the rise, explorers are returning to the oil-rich rock of Colorado as a way to expand beyond the shale plays of Texas and New Mexico. During the three-year crude-market collapse, as prices fell below $27/bbl, the Denver-Julesburg basin northeast of Denver was largely abandoned as explorers tightened down drilling budgets. Now, with prices headed toward $60 on the heels of OPEC-led production cuts, the region is spurring renewed interest.

Drillers flock to Rockies as sleepiest corner of shale awakens

The massive explosion that shut down natural gas flows for half a day in Austria this week was caused by a loose cap seal on a newly-installed filtering unit, according to investigations by the operator of the Baumgarten hub. The cap was on an installation that removes solid or fluid parts from the gas stream. The incident triggered a chain of events that culminated in a blast that halted flows through the facility about 9 a.m. on Dec. 12, according to a statement from the pipeline’s owner, OMV AG’s Gas Connect Austria GmbH. Gazprom PJSC, the hub’s biggest user, suggested safety breaches were involved, a claim denied by Gas Connect.

Loose cap caused blast in Austria that rattled energy market

Oil’s slump is over and industry domination beckons, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. In 2018, companies from Royal Dutch Shell Plc to ExxonMobil Corp. will find themselves with a surplus of cash to fund dividends, ruling the world of deepwater mega-projects and even coming out ahead in tax negotiations with oil-reliant governments around the globe, according to Michele Della Vigna, Goldman’s head of energy-industry research.

Goldman says oil giants poised for best year in decades

Turns out, America’s decade-long shale boom might just end up being a little too good to be true. There’s no denying that fracking has turned the U.S. into a force in the global oil and gas markets, which has more than a few people abuzz about the prospect of energy independence. But now, researchers at MIT have uncovered one potentially game-changing detail: a flaw in the Energy Department’s official forecast, which may vastly overstate oil and gas production in the years to come. The culprit, they say, lies in the Energy Information Administration’s premise that better technology has been behind nearly all the recent output gains, and will continue to boost production for the foreseeable future. That’s not quite right. Instead, the research suggests increases have been largely due to something more mundane: low energy prices, which led drillers to focus on sweet spots where oil and gas are easiest to extract..

MIT Study Suggests U.S. Vastly Overstates Oil Output Forecasts - Bloomberg

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Saudi Aramco is looking for natural gas assets from Russia to East Africa and the U.S. as the kingdom’s state-owned energy giant hunts for ways to meet soaring domestic demand. The comments by Khalid Al-Falih, who’s both Aramco chairman and Saudi energy minister, are a tacit admission Aramco has failed to find enough domestic gas reserves despite years of exploration. He’s now considering imports of super-cooled liquefied natural gas to bridge the gap with local consumption and cut the amount of crude oil burned in power stations instead of exported for profit.

Saudi Aramco embarks on global hunt for natural gas supplies

Rystad Energy concluded this week that 2017 was yet another record low year for discovered conventional volumes globally. Less than 7 Bboe has been discovered YTD. “We haven’t seen anything like this since the 1940s,” says Sonia Mladá Passos, senior analyst at Rystad Energy. “The discovered volumes averaged at ~550 MMboe per month. The most worrisome is the fact that the reserve replacement ratio in the current year reached only 11% (for oil and gas combined) - compared to over 50% in 2012.” According to Rystad’s analysis, 2006 was the last year when reserve replacement ratio reached 100%; largely thanks to the giant onshore gas field Galkynysh in Turkmenistan.

All-time low for discovered resources in 2017, Rystad reports

When a vital North Sea oil pipeline cracked earlier this month, it did more than halt the flow of barrels: it stress tested the world’s most important physical crude-price benchmark for producers, traders and consumers. The 40-year-old Forties Pipeline System was shut down on Dec. 11 after a hairline crack was discovered near Aberdeen, Scotland. The outage resulted in the loss of 40% of crude that forms the world’s most important physical oil benchmark, Dated Brent. Flows of crudes underpinning the measure fell to the lowest since at least 2007 and not far from a level that could even have undermined the reliability of the yardstick.

World's most important oil benchmark feels strain of pipe crack

Goldman Sachs threw itself into the oil bull camp for 2018, forecasting 9% total returns over the next 12 months as OPEC and Russia continue their efforts to tackle the global supply glut. In a note out late Monday, the bank’s commodity analysts led by Damien Courvalin and Jeffrey Currie, lifted their 2018 spot forecasts for Brent LCOG8, -0.32%  and West Texas Intermediate crude CLF8, -0.59%  to $62 a barrel and $57.50, respectively. Previously, Goldman GS, +0.68% had a spot forecast for Brent around $58 next year and WTI at $55.

Here’s why Goldman just lifted its oil-price forecast for 2018 - MarketWatch

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Below is a transcript of a Reuters interview with Saudi Arabia’s Minister of Energy, Industry and Mineral Resources Khalid al-Falih. For related stories, click and Q. With the recent shutdown of Britain’s Forties crude oil pipeline and the decline of production in Venezuela, do you see a change in market fundamentals that would lead to an earlier-than-expected market rebalancing? A. When we entered into the agreement to extend in Vienna, we were looking at the mid-to-long term as our objective. I said then and I say it again today, that almost the single metric that we look at is global inventories and of course the most transparent and trustworthy is the OECD inventories and it takes time to track these.

Saudi Energy Minister Q&A with Reuters

There is a limit to how big a role US shale can play in the global oil market, according to the chief executive of BP, who said traditional producers such as Saudi Arabia would continue to exert more influence over crude prices. Bob Dudley said he had become less worried about the extent to which US shale resources could hold down prices as more was learned about their geology.  “There are cracks appearing in the model of the Permian being one single, perfect oilfield,” he told the Financial Times, referring to the region of Texas and New Mexico at the centre of the shale revolution.

BP chief says shale will have limited effect on global oil market

Saudi Arabia is hunting for an energy deal in American shale country, as economic upheaval pushes it to seek its first international oil-and-gas production investments. Saudi Arabian Oil Co., known as Aramco, has had initial conversations about taking a stake in Tellurian Inc., a liquefied-natural-gas developer based in Houston, or agreeing to buy some of its fuel in the future, people familiar with the matter said.

Tables Turned: Saudi Arabia Hunts for Oil Assets in the U.S. - WSJ

Rystad Energy concluded this week that 2017 was yet another record low year for discovered conventional volumes globally. Less than seven billion barrels of oil equivalent has been discovered YTD.  “We haven’t seen anything like this since the 1940s,” says Sonia Mladá Passos, Senior Analyst at Rystad Energy. “The discovered volumes averaged at ~550 million barrels of oil equivalent per month. The most worrisome is the fact that the reserve replacement ratio* in the current year reached only 11% (for oil and gas combined) - compared to over 50% in 2012.” According to Rystad’s analysis, 2006 was the last year when reserve replacement ratio reached 100%; largely thanks to the giant onshore gas field Galkynysh in Turkmenistan.

All-time low for discovered resources in 2017: Around 7 billion barrels of oil equivalent was discovered

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U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke ​released an updated resource assessment​ for​ the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska (NPR-A), the Western Beaufort Sea, adjacent State and Native lands, and State waters​,​​ which estimates the mean undiscovered, technically recoverable resources both on and offshore to include 17.6 Bbbl of oil and more than 50 Tcf of gas.

New survey shows ​huge increase in recoverable energy resources in Alaska

Iraq’s Oil Minister Jabbar Al-Luaibi said he’s optimistic crude prices will rise in 2018, with global stockpiles falling and demand on the rise in China and India. “I am very optimistic that in the first quarter, oil markets will witness balance,” Luaibi told reporters in Baghdad.

Iraq's oil minister says he's optimistic crude prices will rise

Canada’s economy unexpectedly stalled in October on a decline in oil output, a disappointing kickoff to the final quarter of 2017. Gross domestic product was unchanged from September, Statistics Canada reported Friday in Ottawa, weighed down by a 3.5% drop in production by oil sands companies. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg News had forecast a 0.2% gain for October.

Canada's economy unexpectedly stalls as oil production drops

Kuwait struck a 15-year deal with Royal Dutch Shell Plc for liquefied natural gas, locking in supplies as neighbors in the oil rich Gulf consider their own import strategies. The United Arab Emirates and Kuwait are the only importers of LNG in the region, with Bahrain joining the club in 2019. Saudi Arabia is looking at natural gas assets from Russia to East Africa and the U.S. The three oil producers pump about half of OPEC’s output, but use growing quantities of that crude in power generation, losing out on export revenue.

Kuwait secures LNG deal as Gulf energy exporters hunt for gas

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Oil retreated from its highest close in more than two years in London and New York amid low volume, as a pipeline carrying crude to a Libyan export terminal was said to need a week for repairs following an explosion on Tuesday. West Texas Intermediate crude futures slipped after breaching $60/bbl on Tuesday for the first time since June 2015. A pipeline run by Waha Oil Co. that carries crude to Libya’s Es Sider terminal exploded Tuesday, reducing output by as much as 100,000 bpd. The repair work will take about a week, according to people familiar with the situation.

Oil slips from highest since mid-2015 as trading volume muted

Three years after causing an oil-price crash, the shale boom may not be enough to meet rising global demand because the industry has cut back so sharply on higher-risk mega-projects. Discoveries of new reserves this year were the fewest on record and replaced just 11% of what was produced, according to a Dec. 21 report by consultant Rystad Energy. While shale wells are creating a glut now, without more investment in bigger, conventional supply, the world may see output deficits as soon as 2019, according to Canadian producer Suncor Energy Inc.

All that new shale oil may not be enough as big discoveries wane

Petrobras, as the Operator and acting on behalf of the Libra Consortium, announces that today it submitted the declaration of commerciality to the Brazil’s National Petroleum, Natural Gas and Biofuels Agency (ANP) regarding the oil accumulation located in the northwestern portion of Libra block, in the Pre-salt of the Santos basin. Source: Petrobras. It was also submitted to ANP the final report, part of the Discovery Evaluation Plan (DEP) of the 2-ANP-2A-RJS well, the discovery well of the Libra reservoir in 2010. In the declaration sent to the regulatory agency, it was suggested that the new field should be named Mero, and the field’s total recoverable volume is estimated at 3.3 Bbbl of oil.

Newly named Mero field estimated to hold 3.3 Bbbl

Total announces that it has taken the investment decision for the first large-scale development phase of the Libra project, located deep offshore, 180 km off the coast of Rio de Janeiro, in the pre-salt area of the Santos basin in Brazil.  This phase, consisting of a floating production storage and offloading (FPSO) unit with a production capacity of 150,000 bopd and 17 wells, will be deployed in the Northwestern part of the block.

Total launches large-scale development of giant Libra field