Locator: 49505OIL.
From May 30, 2025, link here.
Production:
Locator: 48729PRODUCTION.
Production:
Locator: 48415B.
Under the Biden administration, link here.
Re-posting:
Locator: 48408PEAKOIL.
US crude oil field production.
Since August, 2022, not one month less than 12 million bopd.
One year later, August 2023, hit 13 million bopd and never dropped below that 13-handle except for one month -- January, 2024.
Locator: 44849B.
If you have time for only one energy story today, this is is.
From the link:
Saudi Arabia over the weekend slashed 10% of the kingdom’s oil output to boost prices, and the returns so far suggest it could be a costly bet.
After warning speculators that OPEC+ could cut oil production again, Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman announced Sunday that the world’s biggest crude exporter would reduce 1 million barrels of its own output in July after other cartel members refused to join the effort.
The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its Russia-led allies account for close to half of the world’s oil production.
An output cut was expected to prop up prices amid concerns about a slowing global economy crimping energy demand. On Monday, oil prices opened sharply higher but gave up most of those gains. Brent crude, the international oil benchmark, rose 0.8% to settle at $76.71 a barrel.
Oil prices remain about 18% lower than they were when OPEC+ first jolted the market in October with output cuts, which some members, including Saudi Arabia and Russia, expanded in April.
Saudi officials familiar with the matter acknowledged that Monday’s increase in oil prices was less than expected by Abdulaziz, who privately defended the move to cut output and push back against short sellers after the contentious meeting, they said.
In other words, Abdulaziz remains an unhappy camper.
The two big stories today:
OPEC+:
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How Bad Is It?
Previously posted:
Locator: 44842SA.
The "y-axis" has been changed from last month's posting making things look better than they really area.
Today's one year view:
The five-year view is better and other time-spans also show how badly Saudi Arabia must be hurting.
The big story today -- Russia -- of this in the past week:
Seaborne diesel plummets, link here:
Economy implodes, link here:
Drones and thrones:
From the linked WSJ article:
The opening months of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year drove an increase in oil and natural-gas prices that brought a windfall for Moscow. Those days are over.
As the war continues into its second year and Western sanctions bite harder, Russia’s government revenue is being squeezed and its economy has shifted to a lower-growth trajectory, likely for the long term.
The country’s biggest exports, gas and oil, have lost major customers. Government finances are strained. The ruble is down over 20% since November against the dollar. The labor force has shrunk as young people are sent to the front or flee the country over fears of being drafted. Uncertainty has curbed business investment.
“Russia’s economy is entering a long-term regression,” predicted Alexandra Prokopenko, a former Russian Central Bank official who left the country shortly after the invasion.There is no sign the economic difficulties are bad enough to pose a short-term threat to Russia’s ability to wage war. But state revenue shortfalls suggest an intensifying dilemma over how to reconcile ballooning military expenditures with the subsidies and social spending that have helped President Vladimir Putin shield civilians from hardship.
Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska warned this month that Russia is running out of cash. “There will be no money next year, we need foreign investors,” the raw-materials magnate said at an economic conference.
Having largely lost its European market next door, and with other Western investors pulling out, Moscow is becoming ever more reliant on China, threatening to realize long-simmering fears in Moscow of becoming an economic colony of its dominant southern neighbor.
Much more at the link.
Russia is a gas station on an island. And that was before Putin's war.
From what I can tell, this pretty much summarizes Russia:
The big question: why has Putin not yet used tactical nukes?
Russia’s crude oil production is on the rise so far in May, Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak told TASS news agency on Monday.
Russia’s crude oil production slipped by half a million bpd in March, by a full million bpd in April, with many analysts stating concern that those barrels may never return to the market. April’s OPEC+ production quota was set at 10.436 million bpd.
But according to Novak, the picture isn’t quite so bleak, with Russian crude oil production now stabilizing despite sanctions.
“Looking at the figures of early May, they are better than in April. The situation is stable, the output increased in comparison to April. We are counting on partial recovery of data in May and that it will be better,” Novak told TASS, without quantifying the increased production figures.
According to Interfax, Russia’s crude oil production slipped to 10.05 million bpd in April, a decline of about 4% year over year, but for the first few days in May, this had edged up 2% over April figures, to an average of 10.28 million bpd.
But even that increase is a far cry from Russia’s May output quota set by the OPEC+ group, which is 10.549 million barrels per day.
Somewhat unexpected but let's see where Russian production is a year from now.
The oil tankers docking at the refinery in Baytown, Texas, look exactly like many others plying the waters of the Houston Ship Channel. But stashed inside their capacious holds is an unusual cargo: Russian petroleum. The sprawling complex, which belongs to Exxon Mobil Corp., isn’t the only U.S. refinery that’s been receiving shipments of Russian oil. Chevron Corp.’s plant in Mobile, Ala., and Valero Energy Corp.’s facility in St. Charles, La., are also customers.More at the linked article.
Deprived of access to Venezuelan crude by U.S. sanctions on the regime of Nicolás Maduro, and facing reduced shipments from OPEC nations since the cartel cut output, U.S. refiners turned to Russian oil in 2020 to fill the gap. The buying spree, combined with sharply lower Saudi shipments, catapulted Russia into the position of third-largest oil supplier to the U.S. last year. The feat for the Kremlin has been the talk of the oil market, but surprisingly it hasn’t been discussed much in diplomatic circles. “Russia’s move into third place has not attracted any attention in Washington,” says Bob McNally, a former senior White House policy adviser who now runs Rapidan Energy Group, a consulting firm in Washington.
America’s increasing reliance on Russian oil is at odds with U.S. energy diplomacy. For the last two years, lawmakers in Washington have been lobbying European countries to abandon Nord Stream 2, a multibillion-dollar pipeline to transport Siberian gas to Germany, fearing it will give the Kremlin further leverage over U.S. allies. (Russian gas accounted for about 45% of Europe’s natural gas imports in 2019.) Congress went as far last year as to authorize the use of sanctions against companies involved in the project. The Biden administration hasn’t indicated whether it’s considering exercising that option.
More important, perhaps, the quiet surge in Russian oil imports shows that the mantra of energy independence championed by former U.S. President Trump is hollow, says Mark Finley, a former oil analyst at the CIA who’s now a fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute in Houston. Campaigning last year in Texas, Trump boasted that the U.S. was the “No. 1 energy superpower” and the country would never again have to depend on “hostile” foreign suppliers. “So much for energy dominance,” Finley says.
In February of last year, the Trump administration blacklisted a trading subsidiary of state-run Rosneft, the largest Russian oil company, saying it provided a financial lifeline to Maduro’s government. But no other Russian entities were targeted, meaning U.S. companies could carry on buying Russian crude and refined products.
The path for Russia to become a key oil supplier to the U.S. was paved with market savvy, luck, and the Kremlin’s proven ability to turn Washington’s policies to its favor. After years of accounting for less than 0.5% of annual U.S. imports of oil and refined products, Russia steadily increased its share over the last decade, reaching an all-time high of 7% last year, according to Bloomberg News calculations. U.S. imports from Russia averaged 538,000 barrels a day in 2020—more than the 522,000-barrel-a-day average from Saudi Arabia.
OPEC's crude production climbed in April to 32.64 million barrels per day, close to the highest in recent history, a Reuters survey showed.
Iraq's April exports from southern fields increased, as did seaborne exports from Russia, the biggest exporter outside OPEC.
Traders also cited market intelligence firm Genscape's report of a 821,969 barrel rise in stockpiles at the Cushing, Oklahoma delivery point for U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures during the week to April 29.
