Current Export Wave Could Become A Tsunami -- RBN Energy -- December 11, 2018

Factoid: China imports every day the equivalent of the entire production of the US. Or Saudi Arabia. Or Russia. In round numbers, China imports 11 million bopd. The US, Saudi Arabia, and Russia each produce about 11 million bopd. Now this: China's crude oil imports jump to record high in November, 2018.

Chinese crude oil imports surged to an all-time high of 10.43 million bpd (barrels per day) last month, up by 8.5 percent compared to November 2017 and beating the previous record of 9.61 million bpd, which was set just a month earlier and was driven by smaller independent refiners who were rushing to fulfill their 2018 oil import quotas before they expire. 

As recently as 2002, China was consuming less than 5 million bopd.

Mexico: to build a new refinery --

Mexico plans to start awarding the construction of its seventh refinery as soon as March 2019, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said Sunday at an event at the Dos Bocas port in Tabasco, even as the nation´s refining system is operating at its lowest levels in three decades.

Unveiling a plan for the nation’s refining system, Lopez Obrador said Mexico will invest $8 billion in the new processing facility at Dos Bocas.

Mexico’s oil production, on track for its 14th consecutive yearly decline, will rise "realistically" to 2.4 million barrels a day by 2024.

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Back to the Bakken

Only one well coming off confidential list today -- Tuesday, December 11, 2018:

• 33892, SI/NC, Hess, SC-5WX-152-99-0310H-3, Banks, no production data, the SC-5WX wells are tracked here;

Active rigs:

$51.61	12/11/2018	12/11/2017	12/11/2016	12/11/2015	12/11/2014
Active Rigs	64	52	40	65	186

RBN Energy: reverse-lightering crude oil supertankers along the Gulf Coast.

There’s a reason why more than half a dozen midstream companies and joint ventures are clamoring to build deepwater loading terminals on the Gulf of Mexico: because it’s a major pain to load Very Large Crude Carriers (VLCCs) any other way. These days, the standard operating procedure for loading the vast majority of VLCCs along the Gulf Coast involves a complex, time-consuming and costly process of ship-to-ship transfers called reverse-lightering, in which smaller tankers ferry out and transfer crude to VLCCs in specified lightering areas off the coast. Today, we ponder the current dynamics for U.S. crude exports via VLCC. 

Even before the 40-year prohibition on most crude oil exports from the U.S. was lifted in December 2015, we were blogging about how an end to the export ban would help shape the landscape for U.S. crude production. In the past three years, the growth in export volumes has been stunning — from 590 Mb/d in 2016, on average, to 1.1 MMb/d last year and 1.9 MMb/d through October in 2018.

As the market looks to the immediate future, projections for rising crude production from the prolific Permian, Eagle Ford and SCOOP/STACK shale plays suggest that the export wave could soon look more like a tsunami, especially after a few new crude pipelines come online.