OPEC on Tuesday raised its forecast of oil supplies from non-member countries in 2015, a sign that crude's price collapse is taking longer than expected to hit U.S. shale drillers and other competing sources.
In a monthly report, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) forecast no extra demand for its crude oil this year despite faster global growth in consumption, because of higher-than-expected production from the United States and other countries outside the group.
In contrast, the U.S. government on Tuesday lowered both its 2015 and 2016 U.S. oil production forecasts, signalling that the 60-percent rout in benchmark prices since last summer may finally be weighing on shale output.
The U.S. 2015 crude oil production growth forecast was cut by 100,000 barrels per day (bpd) to 650,000 bpd from the previous report, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration's short-term energy outlook. Meanwhile, it expanded the production decline forecast for 2016 by 400,000 bpd from a 150,000 bpd decline previously.
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Polar Bear Reprieve
Flashback, from November 8, 2011 -- The (London) Telegraph, as reported by Nick Collins:
Prof Peter Wadhams, of Cambridge University, said the ice that forms over the Arctic sea is shrinking so rapidly that it could vanish altogether in as little as four years' time.
Although it would reappear again every winter, its absence during the peak of summer would rob polar bears of their summer hunting ground and threaten them with extinction.
The mass of ice between northern Russia, Canada and Greenland waxes and wanes with the seasons, currently reaching a minimum size of about four million square kilometres.Most models, including the latest estimates by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), track the decline in the area covered by ice in recent years to predict the rate at which it will deteriorate.
But citing research compiled by Dr Wieslaw Maslowski, a researcher from the American Naval Postgraduate School, last year Prof Wadhams said such predictions failed to spot how quickly climate change is causing the ice to thin.Flash forward to today: from StevenGoddard -- Hudson Bay sea ice extent 4th highest on record. Meanwhile, the Arctic Basin has been covered with clouds and cold air for weeks, and melting has essentially stopped there.
Canadian Coast Guard is reporting "unusual presence of sea ice" int he Hudson.
Whatever happened to Nick Collins, Science Correspondent for The [London] Telegraph?
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