One More Agenda Item For The OPEC Meeting In September -- August 9, 2016

This is really quite incredible. Despite huge cutbacks in current spending and in CAPEX going forward, oil companies are squeezing out ever-better production (previously reported).

From Rigzone / Bloomberg:

For Norway, the collapse in crude prices has a silver lining: output has exceeded expectations every month for the past two years.

That’s likely to continue as oil companies boost efficiency and pump at full pace amid dwindling revenue, according to the head of Petoro AS, the state-owned oil company that owns more than a quarter of the petroleum output in Western Europe’s biggest producer.

“Improvement efforts and the focus on profitability have led to very high regularity,” Chief Executive Officer Grethe Moen said in a phone interview on Friday from Stavanger, Norway’s oil hub. “There’s no sign this won’t last, at least thus far.”

Companies, led by state-controlled Statoil ASA, which operates about 70 percent of the fields, have slashed investments and sought to increase efficiency to combat a rout that has left oil prices 60 percent lower than two years ago. But even as spending on future production dwindles, current output has risen thanks to more efficient operations and past investments that have just started delivering barrels.

That time-frame of "the past two years" is the important phrase in the story above. It was in October, 2014, when Saudi Arabia said it would not cut production but, instead, would "protect its market share." We are about two months from "celebrating" the two-year anniversary of the SaudiSurge. Or trillion-dollar mistake.