Russia/Ukraine conflict

[wdolson]

There is some resistance to the Russians developing in Crimea

https://twitter.com/x/status/1546474768479797248

I was pondering this weekend how long it would be until we saw T-34s in this war. I didn't have to wait long, though this one is probably not usable for anything more than a symbolic gesture

https://twitter.com/x/status/1546481028260368386

 

[kabin]

The oil companies/oil producers are not spending money on exploration, development or maintainence because those are long term investments and they have known for a while that oil product use will be on a major decline in the near future. Instead they spent billions on trying to delay the changeover. They will only do what is profitable to them.

Yep, in the meantime increased profits and dividends to shareholders but there's still too many challenges for a significant sized transition to alternative fuel options in the forseeable future and that only worsened with this conflict.

 

[wdolson]

What it appears the plans are for the HIMARS
Thread by @TrentTelenko on Thread Reader App

They might completely dismantle Russia's logistical system in Ukraine leaving their units starved for supplies.

 

[petit_bateau]

Yes, that's what I meant. Enough for necessities, but they will probably need to cut back on luxuries.



US production from currently shut in wells will help, but the timescale for exploration is much too long. 10 years is a short window on start of exploration to start of production. These days it's longer than that because of the massive shortage of Geologists to do the work.

There is basically no exploration required for the shale plays, and these are the relevant ones. There are file-fulls of worked-up shale acreage ready to drill & frac. And further file-fulls which just need a bit of infill 3D shooting and/or re-analysing so which would take a little longer. However - and quite understandably - neither the shale cos themselves, nor the service cos, nor the finance backers want to go pell mell at "drill baby drill". Because they know the oil & gas price spike will likely be of relatively short duration. At least they won't take the risk on their own money, and if I was on their boards I'd be saying the same thing.

 

[wdolson]

There is basically no exploration required for the shale plays, and these are the relevant ones. There are file-fulls of worked-up shale acreage ready to drill & frac. And further file-fulls which just need a bit of infill 3D shooting and/or re-analysing so which would take a little longer. However - and quite understandably - neither the shale cos themselves, nor the service cos, nor the finance backers want to go pell mell at "drill baby drill". Because they know the oil & gas price spike will likely be of relatively short duration. At least they won't take the risk on their own money, and if I was on their boards I'd be saying the same thing.

My sister has been a petroleum Geologist on the production side since 1980. Virtually all she worked on was the existing California oil fields and she had plenty of work. She's mostly retired now because everybody pretty much stopped drilling new wells in the US in the 2018-2019 time frame. The shale oil had become a glut on the market and anybody with leases on low volume wells was losing their shirt with the low oil prices.

Drilling new wells in existing fields is quicker than bringing an entirely new field online, but each new well takes a few months of Geology work to site the well properly and anticipate at what depth the oil will be found. The landscape under the Earth can vary just as much as the surface.

Once the Geology is done, all the services to drill and finish the well need to be booked. That's tougher now because when the price of oil cratered, a lot of people retired, went and did something else, or moved abroad to drill wells overseas. The well drilling equipment near the end of life was scrapped, the newer stuff went overseas, and nobody has made any new equipment in ~5 years. Again, a lot of the expertise is off doing something else.

The average age of the technical skills in the oil business is quite high because the major oil companies quit training new talent in the early 1990s. It used to be that the major oil companies were where everyone started fresh out of school. Some would stay on, while others would branch out to smaller companies that didn't have the money to train new talent. When the majors quit training, the average age of the technical people started getting older and now a high percentage are retirement age or older.

I have a friend who was a career Geophysicist at Marathon Oil. He took early retirement at 55 and worked for a couple of smaller Geology firms for about 10 years. Every place he worked, he was one of the youngest professionals in the office.

The oil business is struggling to ramp up production to replace Russian oil because the talent to do the job just aren't there anymore.

 

[petit_bateau]

My sister has been a petroleum Geologist on the production side since 1980. Virtually all she worked on was the existing California oil fields and she had plenty of work. She's mostly retired now because everybody pretty much stopped drilling new wells in the US in the 2018-2019 time frame. The shale oil had become a glut on the market and anybody with leases on low volume wells was losing their shirt with the low oil prices.

Drilling new wells in existing fields is quicker than bringing an entirely new field online, but each new well takes a few months of Geology work to site the well properly and anticipate at what depth the oil will be found. The landscape under the Earth can vary just as much as the surface.

Once the Geology is done, all the services to drill and finish the well need to be booked. That's tougher now because when the price of oil cratered, a lot of people retired, went and did something else, or moved abroad to drill wells overseas. The well drilling equipment near the end of life was scrapped, the newer stuff went overseas, and nobody has made any new equipment in ~5 years. Again, a lot of the expertise is off doing something else.

The average age of the technical skills in the oil business is quite high because the major oil companies quit training new talent in the early 1990s. It used to be that the major oil companies were where everyone started fresh out of school. Some would stay on, while others would branch out to smaller companies that didn't have the money to train new talent. When the majors quit training, the average age of the technical people started getting older and now a high percentage are retirement age or older.

I have a friend who was a career Geophysicist at Marathon Oil. He took early retirement at 55 and worked for a couple of smaller Geology firms for about 10 years. Every place he worked, he was one of the youngest professionals in the office.

The oil business is struggling to ramp up production to replace Russian oil because the talent to do the job just aren't there anymore.

I've also spent quite a lot of time in O&G. (So she has worked on Bakersfield EOR etc). What you are describing might be true of the traditional G&G approach to field development, but isn't often true for the well planning in the shale plays hence my earlier comments. That said I agree with the comment re the ageing of the skilled workforce in O&G.

 

[Doggydogworld]

You think the public would have been OK with that?

With rationing? Hell, no. But they aren't OK with $5 gas, either. Rationing could have kept prices low and spread the pain equally between rich and poor, but such sensible actions require political courage. So instead they try to shift blame to Putin and the "greedy oil companies".

 

[Unclepaul]

Perhaps the real solution is to let the free market level off the supply/demand/pricing oil issues.

If the government would get out of the way, professional oil field developers would work hard to keep a balance between supply and demand.

When oil prices get high, they would open up the marginal fields to pump enough oil to increase supply, which would decrease prices.
When oil priced get lower they would stop producing from these marginal fields, as they would no longer be profitable.

This would provide the optimum amount of oil to the World, and at pricing that would be self regulating.

Governments taking oil out of our strategic reserves ignore why we have these strategic reserves in the first place. To assure that in the times of war or geopolitical turmoil, there will be a tappable resource to see us through till additional regional supply can be brought on line.

The eco-radicals seem to ignore the pain caused by too quickly taking oil supplies off the menu.

 

[JRP3]

With rationing? Hell, no. But they aren't OK with $5 gas, either. Rationing could have kept prices low and spread the pain equally between rich and poor, but such sensible actions require political courage. So instead they try to shift blame to Putin and the "greedy oil companies".

How is restricting supply going to keep pricing low? And how is the invasion which caused this price increase not Putin's fault, and how is the higher price per gallon vs price per barrel than at other times not oil company gouging?

 

[JRP3]

If the government would get out of the way, professional oil field developers would work hard to keep a balance between supply and demand.

Provide any evidence that US oil companies could increase production volume fast enough in any meaningful way to bring down prices significantly. Also show why oil companies would want lower prices for their products.

 

[stopcrazypp]

Perhaps the real solution is to let the free market level off the supply/demand/pricing oil issues.

If the government would get out of the way, professional oil field developers would work hard to keep a balance between supply and demand.

When oil prices get high, they would open up the marginal fields to pump enough oil to increase supply, which would decrease prices.
When oil priced get lower they would stop producing from these marginal fields, as they would no longer be profitable.

This seems to be a fairly naive view in context with the last time oil companies expanded production.
Hundreds of US oil companies could go bankrupt

There are huge overheat costs for expanding production, and if oil companies can make a good profit with existing production, why would they have any incentive to increase supply and reduce prices (other than if someone else pays for it)? They are all well aware of the fact that these types of prices are likely short term (this factor is also why there won't be many, if any, new companies jumping in either, which usually is one market mechanism to reduce prices). All of them are pivoting to a new future where they may need to rely on other things than oil to succeed as a company, so there is no long term incentive for stepped up investment.

 

[wdolson]

Perhaps the real solution is to let the free market level off the supply/demand/pricing oil issues.

If the government would get out of the way, professional oil field developers would work hard to keep a balance between supply and demand.

When oil prices get high, they would open up the marginal fields to pump enough oil to increase supply, which would decrease prices.
When oil priced get lower they would stop producing from these marginal fields, as they would no longer be profitable.

This would provide the optimum amount of oil to the World, and at pricing that would be self regulating.

Governments taking oil out of our strategic reserves ignore why we have these strategic reserves in the first place. To assure that in the times of war or geopolitical turmoil, there will be a tappable resource to see us through till additional regional supply can be brought on line.

The eco-radicals seem to ignore the pain caused by too quickly taking oil supplies off the menu.

Tapping the strategic reserve was intended as a stop gap while domestic production spooled up. And US production is coming up
U.S. Field Production of Crude Oil (Thousand Barrels per Day)

US oil production hit 11 million barrels a day in August of 2018 and there have only been 8 months since where production was less than that. Most at the height of the pandemic. The data only goes to April 2022, but in March and April US production was up ~300K barrels a day over the previous couple of months, but on par with late 2021.

At least in April we weren't up around the levels for 2019 and early 2020 yet. That involved turning on a lot of marginal wells and when a well has been shut in, there is often some rehab that needs to be done to get the well flowing again. Additionally when a well has been shut in and reopened, it often will never return to it's previous volume, or if it does, it often takes time to get flowing at full rate again.

The oil business has a shortage of people killed to do the jobs and it's taking longer to get wells back online because there are not enough people to do the job. Because a lot of oilfield supply companies had scaled back or shut down altogether, there is likely a shortage of hardware to get wells back online.

 

[madodel]

Greece, Bulgaria inaugurate IGB gas pipeline

Prime Minister of Greece Kyriakos Mitsotakis and his Bulgarian counterpart Kiril Petkov symbolically turned the gas valve at the new IGB pipeline. It will initially be supplied from Azerbaijan through the TAP pipeline.​

 

[kabin]

U.S. Field Production of Crude Oil (Thousand Barrels per Day)

That's good info. Peak production was Nov 2019 and it substantially dropped through 2020 and was relatively flat in 2021 relative to the pandemic, demand, ESG,... The last few months production has been slowly climbing. But we're still 10% below Nov 2019's peak production level.

 

[iPlug]

Ukraine's military says it has destroyed a Russian ammunition depot in the southern city of Nova Kakhovka, killing dozens of soldiers, in an attack apparently involving US-supplied missiles.

...Ukrainian presidential aide Mykhaylo Podolyak attributed the attack to the US-supplied Himars multiple rocket launcher...​

​

...Ukrainian military officials said more than 50 Russian soldiers were killed and military hardware destroyed...​

​

...Russian TV said Monday night's attack was so powerful that windows within a 2km-radius (1.25 miles) had blown out...​

Ukraine claims arms depot attack in occupied Kherson with Himars rockets

 

[UncaNed]

With rationing? Hell, no. But they aren't OK with $5 gas, either. Rationing could have kept prices low and spread the pain equally between rich and poor, but such sensible actions require political courage. So instead they try to shift blame to Putin and the "greedy oil companies".

"Shift" blame to Putin???

 

[TheTalkingMule]

On the oil front, all we really need to know is that the strategic reserve release is working. That 1Mb/d release (that has really been about 500-750kb/d) has pushed US stockpiles of crude + refined products into the black for 6 or so straight weeks.

What does this tell us? When dripping an extra <1% of demand into the marketplace cracks the oil trade while Russia shows no signs of capitulation, I think this tells us the supply shortfall narrative is horseshit.

They now calling it the "impact of looming recession", but that smell the the press simply making up a reason the price of oil futures is going down.

Gas is always gonna be an unreliable supply because it's at least somewhat reliant on oil exploration as a source of fresh supply. Oil doesn't have that problem. We've had plenty of oil this whole time, it was more the oil traders that needed to be broken that the frackers spooling up supply.

Demand is still lower than 2019.

 

[SwedishAdvocate]

I am incredibly disappointed in how Democracy Now! have been, and are covering Putler's Genocide and Crime against Humanity in Ukraine. They are basically parrotting the LIES straight out of the Kremlin(!)...

I don't listen to them as much I used to. I think they've lost it in various degrees regarding other topics as well – but that is a very long discussion that I (of course) won't go into here...

As an example – here is their latest segment (transcript/audio linked below):

As U.S. Funnels Money & Arms to Ukraine, Independent Media Faces Pressure to Parrot Official Narrative

As the Pentagon authorizes an additional $400 million for Ukraine’s defense on Friday, bringing estimated total U.S. security spending on Ukraine under President Biden to a staggering $8 billion, we speak to Joe Lauria, editor-in-chief of Consortium News, about the pressure on news media to...

www.democracynow.org

One can also listen through their iOS/Android app...

 

[[email protected]]

I am incredibly disappointed in how Democracy Now! have been, and are covering Putler's Genocide and Crime against Humanity in Ukraine. They are basically parrotting the LIES straight out from the Kremlin(!)...

I don't listen to them as much I used to. I think they've lost it in various degrees regarding other topics as well – but that is a very long discussion that I (of course) won't go into here...

As an example – here is their latest segment (transcript/audio linked below):

As U.S. Funnels Money & Arms to Ukraine, Independent Media Faces Pressure to Parrot Official Narrative

As the Pentagon authorizes an additional $400 million for Ukraine’s defense on Friday, bringing estimated total U.S. security spending on Ukraine under President Biden to a staggering $8 billion, we speak to Joe Lauria, editor-in-chief of Consortium News, about the pressure on news media to...

www.democracynow.org

One can also listen through their iOS/Android app...

 

[[email protected]]

This site has both Russia and Ukraine reports, melded.....no need for any disappointment cuz the truth is what the truth is. Hard to argue about the facts on the ground: Ukraine. Military Summary And Analysis 12.07.2022