For The Archives -- Re-Balancing And Peak Oil Right Around The Corner -- November 7, 2017

Four articles for the archives:

• "The perfect storm," October 25, 2017. Over at SeekingAlpha.
• Brent hits $64 -- this is just the start of the bull market, November 6, 2017. Over at SeekingAlpha.
• from BloombergBusinessweek: the fracking boom hits a mid-life crisis, November 1, 2017. 
• OPEC fights back, Bloomberg, November 7, 2017.

Two graphs from the SeekingAlpha articles:

 Quiz, open-book: at the first linked article above, what oil basin did the contributor fail to mention?

From the linked BloombergBusinessweek article:
“There’s a complacency that shale is going to continue to produce at the kind of volumes that we had in the past,” says Jim Brilliant, a portfolio manager for Century Management Investment Advisors in Austin, whose investments include shares in energy-related companies. Output has recently failed to meet expectations. As of June, the U.S. Energy Information Administration expected an average of about 9.3 million barrels a day, more than 220,000 barrels a day higher than companies reported.
Two comments:

• see this post (at that post, click on the link to the Whiting, Oasis, and CLR slides); and,
• 220,000 / 9.3 million = 2.3% -- I would say that's a rather good forecast (remember, pollsters as late as the week before the election, had Hillary Clinton 15 points ahead of Trump, and winning the election 

From the Bloomberg article, "OPEC fights back," dated November 7, 2017, one almost has to laugh. These were the two concluding paragraphs:

While prices are a bit better now, the coming years don’t look so great. OPEC is probably going to need to sustain its cuts for another year. Even if the cuts finish in late 2018, it’s looking at zero growth in demand for its crude until 2025 as shale takes all the new market share. 

OPEC’s World Oil Outlook 2017, published today, gives further encouragement. OPEC expects shale oil production to peak after 2025 and decline from about 2030. OPEC will then be required to increase its own output from about 33 million barrels a day in 2025 to 41.4 million in 2040, according to the report.