Oil Barely Avoids Going Under $47 -- June 6,2017

Active rigs:

$47.26	6/6/2017	06/06/2016	06/06/2015	06/06/2014	06/06/2013
Active Rigs	50	26	82	194	189

RBN Energy: great review of EPD. A must-read for those interested in this sort of stuff.

Disclaimer: this is not an investment. Do not make any investment, financial, travel, job, or relationship decisions based on what your read here or what you think you may have read here.

The Qatar: this is exactly what's going on -- Saudi Arabia is reasserting its traditional primary within the GCC. Saudi Arabia's power play leaves Qatar with little room to manoeuvre.

The Saudi dispute with Qatar is rooted in the region’s two biggest power plays. That a usually reluctant Riyadh would choose to open a highly public feud with the tiny Gulf state so soon after hosting Donald Trump and 40 other world leaders stems from a deliberate calculation within the ruling House of Saud that now is the time to consolidate its status.

Trump’s visit marked a return to business as usual for a bilateral relationship that had remained solid until Barack Obama’s second term. Until then, the US had underwritten the regional order for almost 70 years, assessing – contentiously – that the Saudi leadership had been a plank of regional stability. The pivot to Iran, which offered Tehran regional legitimacy in return for agreeing to wind back its nuclear programme, changed all that. For three years, a troubled Riyadh felt as though its wings had been clipped.

Unable to guarantee the backing of a superpower, it looked on as Iran made gains in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon while also reaching out to other allies such as Egypt – and Qatar Successive US administrations had known what they were going to get with the Saudis and most of the Gulf. That has increasingly not been the case with Qatar. The former British protectorate, now the world’s wealthiest country per capita, had not played by the same rules, especially vis a vis its approach to Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood.

US vs OPEC: one million bbls of crude oil are leaving US ports each day; OPEC has not grappled with this yet. From Rigzone.

After a 40-year absence, the United States began shipping its crude around the world in January 2016, but the importance of the occasion is something OPEC hasn’t quite grappled with, experts say. Rather, OPEC’s focus remains on revenue, if not market share, to keep the world’s crude supply and demand in balance.

And once the nine-month extension of production cuts expires next March – and if global oil benchmarks still haven’t busted through to remain above $50 for a significant period of time – the club may see that it was simply not enough.

More than 1 million barrels of oil are leaving U.S. ports each day, noted Jamie Webster, senior director at the BCG Center for Energy Impact. Petroleum product exports are north of 3 million barrels of oil per day.

Jet fuel.

The amount of jet fuel consumed by U.S. airlines increased in both 2015 and 2016, although jet fuel use in 2016 remained 11% lower than its level a decade ago.

Jet fuel use was lower despite the fact that the number of passengers traveling on U.S. carriers in 2016 was 7% higher than in 2007. U.S. airlines with annual operating revenue of more than $20 million—accounting for virtually all of the value of all U.S. airline operating property and equipment—consumed 17.7 billion gallons of fuel in 2016.

Annual growth in jet fuel consumed by U.S. airline carriers was 3% in 2015 and 2% in 2016—the two highest growth rates since 2004. --- EIA