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by danrl
1268 days ago
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Just to add to this: You seem to be referring to the global picture. If we look at the US in isolation it is a different story. 30 yr low was ~4M barrels of crude oil from fields. We were at ~12M Barrels in 2022. It is true that no major field has been opened recently which I blame on the (legitimate) push against fossil fuels and the rising cost of capital for projects that won’t pay off until at least year 5-8 of an investment. Furthermore, the shale revolution made smaller fields competitive and distributed production. Major oil fields opening are not a good indicator anymore for the industry’s state of business. For example, the Bakken formation was already open but only saw its peak extraction relatively recently. Speaking about the US: Crude oil will be around for a long time together with LNG. Whether that is good or not is an interesting question. Either way, the conversation IMHO starts to become very different for the US compared to other significant economies, and global metrics are becoming less useful. (Just one example: German chemical plants are moving to the US where LNG is cheap and abundant. They are rebuilding entire, enormous industrial processing plants. The US attracts fossil fuel based industries without even opening new major oil fields. Just by what is already there. ) |
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The oil market is a fully globalized commodity and there is no "American picture", there is just the global oil market. This is why OPEC can manipulate elections by changing the rate at which they produce oil, and it is why Biden was able to "leverage" global prices to make the taxpayer billions by selling high and buying low.
The American reserves of oil are insignificant with regards to the next generation of transportation, and wringing out the last drops of oil from shale rock at prices approaching $70/breakeven (and rising fast) is not the savior of ICE.
Plus OPEC will happily drop prices and destroy American oil industry every so often because their breakeven is still dramatically lower.
>Speaking about the US: Crude oil will be around for a long time together with LNG. Whether that is good or not is an interesting question. Either way, the conversation IMHO starts to become very different for the US compared to other significant economies, and global metrics are becoming less useful.
"Being around" and "being affordable enough for your F150 and XL SUV" are very different things.
Oil absolutely will not remain affordable for Americans in 15mpg vehicles, and the next decade will see the death of cheap American oil. We cannot print enough debt to subsidize it forever.
When you consider the BILLIONS of humans who want way way more oil in China, India, and Africa (et al), you start to see how declining global production + quadrupling global demand = the end of cheap oil.