US Crude Oil Days Supply Drops Below 27 Days; No Wells Coming Off Confidential List -- March 24, 2022

US crude oil -- days supply: drops below 27 days; stands at 26.6 days. Link here.

No spare capacity:

• 2022 world oil supply - demand deficit: likely to be largest in history; link here;

Now that winter is over, no one seems to care: largest underground natural gas storage in Europe is now empty; run by Gazprom. Link here.

CPC pipeline:

• the US has excluded the Chevron-led Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) from its ban on Russian oil and gas imports announced this week in an attempt to leave open the export route via Russia’s Black Sea coast. Link here.
• OPEC+ appears not interested in filling the gap caused by CPC shutdown. Link here.
• the shutdown is expected to be very short-lived; maybe two months;
• wiki entry;

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Back to the Bakken

Active rigs:

$115.00	3/24/2022	03/24/2021	03/24/2020	03/24/2019	03/24/2018
Active Rigs	35	15	50	69	60

Thursday, March 24, 2022: 38 for the month, 147 for the quarter, 147 for the year
None.

RBN Energy: why US E&Ps have been slow to ramp up crude oil production.

Getting by without a few million barrels a day of Russian crude oil won't be easy for the global market, but it's gotta be done. One way to help ease the supply shortfall would be for U.S. E&Ps to ramp up their crude oil production, but the oil patch's output has remained close to flat — so far at least. 

Why aren't producers jumping in? Are the Biden administration’s policies and mixed messages on hydrocarbons putting the kibosh on production growth? Is it a scarcity of completion crews, or pipes or frac sand? Perhaps it’s worries that increasing production would send oil prices sliding and hurt producers’ bottom lines? Or is it all about ESG and the shift by many large investment funds and banks away from anything related to fossil fuels? Possibly all of the above? In today’s RBN blog, we look at what’s really behind the snail’s pace of U.S. crude oil production growth.