Shell Plans To Re-Develop The North Sea -- Peak Oil? What Peak Oil? Break-Even Price? $40/Bbl -- January 15 ,2018; Closing Out Two Polls

From Bloomberg:

Royal Dutch Shell Plc made one of its biggest commitments to the North Sea in 30 years, with plans to redevelop the Penguins oil and gas field.

The Anglo-Dutch oil major will build a floating production, storage and offloading vessel -- its first new manned installation in almost three decades -- to take output from eight wells it plans to drill. Peak production will be the equivalent of 45,000 barrels a day, with a break-even price of less than $40 a barrel, Shell said on Monday.

Penguins, a joint venture between Shell and Exxon Mobil Corp., is already operational after first being developed in 2002. Oil from the field -- about 150 miles (240 kilometers) northeast of the Shetland Islands -- will be transported by tanker to refineries, while the gas will be sent by a pipeline to the St. Fergus terminal in Scotland.

By the way, there's a story out there today -- I forgot to capture / link it, but Saudi's budget is still based on $80 oil. So when one sees a break-even price of less than $40/bbl it has to be concerning. And the reason that the Penguins is break-even at $40? All the infrastructure is in place.

Sort of like the Bakken. All the infrastructure is in place.

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Closing Out Two Polls

The first poll.
 
We won't know until the November and December, 2017, data comes out in February/March, 2018, but I was curious whether readers thought the national drawdown in US crude oil reserves (being reported on a weekly basis) was due to weather-related events in the Bakken. According to the poll:

• yes: 13%
• no: 84%
• other: 3%

That's my feeling also, that weather had little effect on national drawdown of oil reserves.

The second poll.

A reader was also curious if and when we might see drilling -- at least four new wells -- in the Tyler formation in North Dakota:

• this year (2018) regardless of the price of WTI: 15%
• this year (2018) only if WTI remains solidly above $60: 19%
• slim to no chance this year unless WTI well above $75: 33%
• no sooner than next year (2019), regardless of price: 10%
• no sooner than 2020, regardless of price: 10%
• no sooner than 2022, regardless of price: 14%

I was pleasantly surprised by the optimism shown in the results of this poll. Although there were almost too many choices to make sense of the poll (some might say), one could argue that close to 30% see Tyler activity possible this year; and, most agree that Tyler is dependent on price.

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And Folks Complain About A Small Refinery Or A Single Oil Well

From arstechnica:

This land will never be used for anything else. Gone forever.