P13. Pick Points

Half-a-dozen or so stories of interest:

Well first out of the bag, it appears that the Russia:Ukraine dispute has been resolved, but with this one don’t hold your breath, ‘til its done. Russia after all, isn’t yet getting its own way around the Caspian, where some of the gas may come from. Part of the deal is that EU observers will monitor the transit of gas through Ukraine , but the price dispute is not apparently resolved, so the crisis might not be either.

At the same time Norway, perhaps in response to this crisis, exported a record 343 million cu m of gas yesterday.

None of this went to India, who have had to close one of their 300 MW power stations, and are close to shutting another as they have temporarily run out of natural gas for them. The stations supply New Dehli with power.

I hadn’t caught that Mexico had locked in a price of $70 a barrel for their oil, but apparently they had, and have been making money as a result, relative to what would have happened if they were selling at today’s price. Back in the balmy days of January 2006, Pemex produced a total of 3,810,000 bbl of oil a day, by last November it was down to just above 3 million bbl.. Sensibly production has been cut in half, so even keeping a higher price isn’t going to help when exports in the same time period went from 2,052,000 bbl/day to 1.5 million. The hidden part of those numbers is that domestic consumption has been cut from 1.8 mbd to 1.5 mbd in the same time frame. Wonder how that trend will continue this year? They have started preparation for drilling in Chicontepac, where they hope to bring in another 500,000 bd by 2021 (which is a bit far away).

While Dredging is not normally energy related it is interesting that with Boskalis getting the Nord Stream project, we now have a date (2010) for the underwater part of that work, and the firm has also secured work on a new pipeline from the Safaniyah offshore field in Saudi Arabia (for this year). This will be to provide a way of getting the additional 700,000 bbl a day from the field that is planned to come on line this year. This will start bringing on line the additional 2.5 mbd that Saudi Arabia has said is available. The rest is planned to come as 900,000 bbl.day from the nearby Zuluf, also offshore, 300,000 bbl from Berri, 300,000 from Khurais and 250,000 from Shaybah, if it were all implemented it would lift production from the current 9.6 mbd. The caveat, however, is that this presumes that there is insignificant depletion of production from the existing fields.

And the recession is now starting to bite into jobs in the Energy sector with Schlumberger laying off 1,000 folk.

There are more stories to be found at the Energy Bulletin, and at Drumbeat on The Oil Drum.