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Shale Break-Even Level Could Rise $10 In 2017 | OilPrice.com

Shale producers could see there break-even price move to $60, up from $50.

This is good to know. If the marginal barrel costs to produce is $60, while the marginal cost to substitute with virtual barrels is say $45, then the supply must decline. Moreover the equilibrium price I estimate at $54. Prices will fluctuate around that even as supply declines about 0.6% annually.

By contrast, with a marginal cost of $50, the equilibrium is near $48.2. Since marginal cost is above demand alternatives, the volumes are expected to fall, but only by -0.21%
 
OK, I found another very useful tidbit.

Wood Mackensie estimats that electric vehicles are CURRENTLY displacing 50,000 barrels of oil per day.

World consumption is estimated at 94 million barrels a day (2014, most recent data I could find quickly), forecasted to be 96 million in 2016, roughly a 1% rise per year. At 6% natural decline per year and offsetting the 1% rise per year, we have to hit 6.72 million barrels of displacement. So electric car deployment has to be about 134 times what it is now. To put this in a more interesting way, electric car deployment has to double about 6 times.

That deployment is more-than-doubling yearly in China. Musk's trying to double yearly (on average). So let's say 6 years. 2022. Maybe it will slip to 2023 or 2024.

I'm pleased that this matches the projections I made from different assumptions.
 
Sure does make me want to short the oil industry.

EDIT: Found this article discussing some options for how to be short the industry:
6 Oil ETF Alternatives To Ill-Fated 'UWTI' & 'DWTI' | ETF.com

Besides oil futures (shorting the commodity itself), there are options here for shorting energy equities and for shorting US production and exploration companies. Will companies in the industry be more sensitive to the future for oil we're seeing, or will the commodity be more sensitive, with the company's being sensitive to their delivered profits.

I don't have a good answer, beyond thinking that oil & gas exploration and related companies looks like a hard business to be in (now and for the future).


Back on the current topic, I wonder what sort of response this conversation would get at oilprice.com. I'm especially interested in hearing counters to this idea - there might be factors we're not considering.
 
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Ah.... problem with your virtual barrel calculation for transport. One barrel of crude produces about 19 gallons of gasoline and 12 gallons of "middle distillates" (including diesel); the rest is not used for land transportation. So you'd need cars & trucks getting 32 mpg to get 1000 miles out of a barrel of crude oil. That's substantially higher than the fleet average of 25 mpg.

Also, the EPA rate for Model S is as high as 380 kwh / 1000 miles.

Let's try again. 1 barrel gets you 31 gallons of gas and/or diesel, and at 25 mpg this will move you 775 miles; in a Model S this requires 294.5 kwh, and at 11 cents, that's $32.395. Huh -- it works out quite close to your result, coincidentally. Except that the electricity doesn't require refining or transportation, and the crude oil does, so....

Incidentally, at 18 cents/kwh -- a price I can get with solar and storage at my home right now in a fairly cloudy area -- the "barrel equivalent" price is $53, again forgetting about the large refining and transportation costs of gasoline.

I think, fundamentally, oil can't compete. NOW. The very best fracking companies were claiming breakevens around $35 but apparently that was done by squeezing the oilfield services companies to operate at a loss; they are now raising prices and Irina Slav at oilprice.com thinks their breakevens will go up by $10 pretty much immediately.

High-mpg cars do throw a bit of a spanner into these calculations. If we use a 50 mpg Prius as the Last Great Hope of the oil companies, we get breakevens below $64.79 (for 11 cent electricity), which is still terrifying for the oil companies.

But we really have left something out here. It would be better to calculate this using the refining and transportation costs. A while back you did a regression from average US gasoline prices to oil prices:
GasolinePricePerGallon = $0.922 + 0.0261*WTICrudePricePerBarrel + error
So for the average location in the US with average gas prices, take 11 cent electricity (also the average from the grid), use the Model S efficiency, and you find that the electric car goes at $0.0418 / mile. Comparing to the Last Great Hope For Oil, the 50 mpg Prius, this would be $2.09 / gallon, or $44.75/barrel.

Ramp it down to a better efficiency of .333 wh/mile and the equivalency is $34.85. Down to .300 wh/mile and it's $27.89.

(Use the pessimistic 18 cent electricity and the Model S efficiency and a Prius and you get $95.70. We really shouldn't see oil over $100 again. But if you use the 18 cent electricty and the fleet average of 25, you get $30.19.)

Note that US gas prices are cheaper than in most of the world. So although there will be some spots in the US with extra-cheap gas, most of the world will see gas more expensive than this.

If electricity prices drop even more, as they will...

Anyway, my conclusion from this:
(1) the only two things preventing *all* cars from going electric are the upfront purchase price and the number of cars manufactured. That's *it*. It's hardly even worth calculating fuel-price-equivalency any more, the difference is just too extreme. Electric cars are superior in every qualitative way and they're cheaper to operate no matter what, so they'll sell as fast as they can be manufactured until total market saturation.
(2) Oil prices cannot stay above $45, or indeed $25, for very long (only as long as electric cars are production constrained)
(3) Basically no new oil drilling can be profitable. Possibly some new wells in existing "conventional" oilfields, which Rystad said had an average cost of $29. No new fields, certainly; they all have costs above $40. The only way to make money from oil wells is to pump from existing wells.

I think any good model of the future oil market must be viewed entirely in terms of how fast the electric cars can be manufactured. So the question is, at what point are they manufactured fast enough to displace enough oil to keep up with the decline rate of the existing fields? I think that's a pretty hard question. Given that they'll sell as fast as they can be manufactured, we should see companies falling all over themselves to manufacture electric cars -- and I think we are seeing that (witness Faraday Future). But how fast can they actually get them manufactured?

Tesla is trying to have a huge advantage here, with "factory as a product". And they may well manage to do exactly that.

Movie trailer voice: In a world in which roughnecks and oligarchs battle robotic battery makers and predatory Model S EVs roam the streets freely without drivers, it comes down to one car, the last great hope of oil, the Toyota Prius. Can it go the distance to the last remaining gas station? Or will it have to plug in? Bruce Willis in RANGE ANXIETY. "Yippee ki yay. Let's squeeze 61 miles outta this muther." [Sunday sets on Prius traveling desert highway. Engine clunks out.] "Oh, man. Piece of *sugar*!"


So your forcing me to think about the non-fungibility of petroleum products. Not so much a problem as we approach the peak because demand can adjust to absorb the imbalance in products, but post peak things could get skewed. For example, China is a net exporter of distillates. They have so much demand for gasoline that it over supplies distillates. What happens, then, should the export price of distillates collapses? There may be lower value uses. Cheap enough, these distillates could find their way into the electricity or heating market. For all petro products there is a market of last resort based on BTU, boilers. Beyond that there are disposal costs for unused products. The avoidance of disposal costs could induce negative prices for certain excess products. Perhaps before we get there, it will simply be unprofitable to refine crude. Before we get to that point coal will likely be out of production. What funny here is that as surplus oil products enter the boiler market along with coal and dry gas, the price of solar will also bear down on this market.

By the way, the main thing I was trying to get at with the virtual barrel idea is the sensitivity to the price of batteries, not just the cost of energy, but making that energy mobile. There is a cost difference between a convention drive train and an EV drive train that is mostly driven by the cost of the battery. How might we value that?
 
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inter city gasoline stations will be around for a long time, intra city gasoline stations will become scarce.

consider this, a Ford/Tesla/GM autonomous pickup truck home delivering gasoline/diesel within the city bounds, autonomous EVs means that a ICE users never needs go a a city gasoline station again. Their ICE autonoumsly phones ahead to the mother supplier and petrol/diesel is dispatched when & where required. If it works for pizza, it can work for petrol.

also, America has a poor representation of what PHEVs can do. Consider EU, the Outlander PHEV sold roughly outsold the Tesla S by a margin of 2:1 (this represents a market that both are present, neither has home advantage) The Next generation of Nissan/Mitsubishi PHEVs will tend towards having double the battery capacity (24kWh), 1 less cylinder (3 cylinder) and sub gear (ie 2 speed gear transmission). That may not seem like much cost, because its not, but it is a massive improvement in capability over the current generation PHEVs, kinda akin to the transition from 24kWh to 60kWH BEVs.

the 24kWh class PHEVs will be road worthy for a long long time, their ICE motors only need operating outside the city limits, perhaps a 20% load compared to full ICE case.
 
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Movie trailer voice: In a world in which roughnecks and oligarchs battle robotic battery makers and predatory Model S EVs roam the streets freely without drivers, it comes down to one car, the last great hope of oil, the Toyota Prius. Can it go the distance to the last remaining gas station? Or will it have to plug in? Bruce Willis in RANGE ANXIETY. "Yippee ki yay. Let's squeeze 61 miles outta this muther." [Sunday sets on Prius traveling desert highway. Engine clunks out.] "Oh, man. Piece of *sugar*!"
;)

So your forcing me to think about the non-fungibility of petroleum products.
Oh yeah, I've been thinking about that for a while.

Not so much a problem as we approach the peak because demand can adjust to absorb the imbalance in products,
Approaching peak, we get a bunch of gluts and depressed prices in the "byproducts", which perversely extend the life of the the markets for those products (natgas, asphalt, heating oil, butane, propane.)

Perhaps before we get there, it will simply be unprofitable to refine crude.
Yes. Refinery margins were squeezed hard during the last price drop and they haven't really recovered. Losing demand for the *highest-margin product*, gasoline, will mean refineries will have to close in order to keep the remaining refineries profitable. This will lower production of ALL byproducts and therefore increase the price of most of them. An interesting counter-reaction to the phenomenon approaching peak.

By the way, the main thing I was trying to get at with the virtual barrel idea is the sensitivity to the price of batteries, not just the cost of energy, but making that energy mobile. There is a cost difference between a convention drive train and an EV drive train that is mostly driven by the cost of the battery. How might we value that?
Yeah, it's a point. I think people aren't going to value it that way though. There's evidence that people simply don't look at the TCO, with the exception of fleet purchasers -- they look at the upfront price and the qualitative aspects when they make their purchase decision. (If they buy a PHEV they may compare gas to electric on a daily basis *after* buying it but they still don't calculate TCO.)

The EV is nicer to drive qualitatively, which is probably worth some quantifiable amount. I'd guess it's worth $5000 if I had to guess, though really different people will value it differently.

Basically I think in the consumer market, an EV priced at $XXX destroys the market for similar ICEs priced at $XXX or higher, and probably for those priced at $XXX - $5000. (The psychological advantage of the tax rebate is that this may translate to $XXX - $5000 - $7500.) Period.

Only fleet buyers will look at the TCO -- so EVs will do more damage to ICE car sales in the fleet market -- which is interesting because the fleet market tends to be more high miles-per-year, which would mean more oil displacement early on...
 
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I guess this makes the CEO an ostrich? So we can expect a steeper crash in oil over the next few years? I can't imagine a sharper rise (due to production falling behind demand) in oil, since there's all that stored oil acting as a shadow supply and buffer.

edit: ... "and buffer"
 
I read that article over - I'm thinking that to the degree the O&G industry really does invest 25 trillion, that's going to turn into an awfully big oil & gas industry problem into an awfully big problem for the finance industry.

I was also thinking that I'm ok with the idea that Saudi Arabia continues investing heavily in their own oil infrastructure and expanding their own low to lowest cost reserves / infrastructure, and become an even more dominant supplier of oil. Somebody will be the last provider of substance, and having it be somebody that can bring the oil up as easily and cheaply as possible is a good thing for the world.


I know I'm also personally divesting from the industry - I'm not willing to short the industry, but to the degree I'm able, I'm also getting my savings out of that industry.
 
I know I'm also personally divesting from the industry - I'm not willing to short the industry, but to the degree I'm able, I'm also getting my savings out of that industry.

May not be the right place to discuss this, but I'm a huge fan of the John Bogle's idea of a lazy portfolio. (My dabbling in TSLA is play money and I'm keenly aware of the risks of stock picking etc.). Now what I would love to do is to have a well-balanced lazy portfolio ex-carbon stocks (forget about coal, don't want no oil). I don't need to be too religious about that, a VTI filtered for the worst carbon offenders (e.g. Carbon Underground 200) would be good enough for me. The problem is: I have no clue how to do it. I simply couldn't find any suitable ETFs. Any ideas?
 
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Sadly no. I haven't seen that specific 'lazy portfolio' idea before, but a brief visit to that link tells me I'm mostly in that camp. I'm mostly using Vanguard funds with as low of a fee structure as I can get for the bulk of my portfolio to keep my expenses down. That translates to an S&P 500 Index fund for example.

But I don't know of anything comparable minus the carbon / oil industry. It looks like the folks you linked, the Carbon Underground 200, are working towards something like that. Now if they can keep it simple and deliver it at 0.10% fee or lower instead of the 1%+ that I expect :|
 

Hmmm. How many Gigafactories are needed to electrify transport, again?

100 Gigafactories @ $5B = $0.5T
100GW/a storage * 100 plants * $67M/GWh (average over 25 years, is likely lower) * 25 years = $16.75T

That leaves $7.75T left over for solar and wind & grid improvements, over the course of 25 years that likely buys 8-10TW of new generation.

Seems like a better deal.
 
I read that article over - I'm thinking that to the degree the O&G industry really does invest 25 trillion, that's going to turn into an awfully big oil & gas industry problem into an awfully big problem for the finance industry.

I was also thinking that I'm ok with the idea that Saudi Arabia continues investing heavily in their own oil infrastructure and expanding their own low to lowest cost reserves / infrastructure, and become an even more dominant supplier of oil. Somebody will be the last provider of substance, and having it be somebody that can bring the oil up as easily and cheaply as possible is a good thing for the world.

I know I'm also personally divesting from the industry - I'm not willing to short the industry, but to the degree I'm able, I'm also getting my savings out of that industry.

I hope the financial industry has more forward thinking about this topic then we saw in the early 2000's in our last melt down. I would prefer my porridge not too hot and not too cold, and I would like our withdrawal from a fossil fuel economy to be orderly and steady. Fools rushing forward with trillions of monetary bullets, only to rush away from the field of battle bankrupt and broken is not appealing.

Seeing divestment groups pushing University endowments and government funds to start pulling out is a good early sign. Getting mutual and ETF funds to start creating post fossil investment options would be a good next step to raise awareness. I think the average American would be surprised that a post fossil fuel economy is possible, let alone a near mathematical certainty.
 
May not be the right place to discuss this, but I'm a huge fan of the John Bogle's idea of a lazy portfolio. (My dabbling in TSLA is play money and I'm keenly aware of the risks of stock picking etc.). Now what I would love to do is to have a well-balanced lazy portfolio ex-carbon stocks (forget about coal, don't want no oil). I don't need to be too religious about that, a VTI filtered for the worst carbon offenders (e.g. Carbon Underground 200) would be good enough for me. The problem is: I have no clue how to do it. I simply couldn't find any suitable ETFs. Any ideas?
I'm lurking a bit at BH forums, there are topics posted on this theme like this: Seeking carbon efficient S&P fund - Bogleheads.org (also check with the search at the top right).
 
I'm lurking a bit at BH forums, there are topics posted on this theme like this: Seeking carbon efficient S&P fund - Bogleheads.org (also check with the search at the top right).

Thanks very much! LOWC, CRBN (even more than KLD) are indeed close to what I'm looking for. I was also hoping for an ETF based on the FFIUS but for the past two years these guys haven't delivered (they promised an ETF earlier)...

[SneakEdit: Beware of the SRI Funds (Socially Responsible Investments): they typically go by "best in class" so they have the "best" oil companies and just exclude the "worst" - which is really not helping my goal of divesting from Oil, Gas, Coal at all!]

Anyways: if $25tn is what is what the oil industry wants, then I think this will be over sooner than many of us think. We have evidence that oil consumption is not holding economic growth "hostage" any longer and we have huge oil companies paying dividends by making new dept. We have a collapsing coal industry and with the most recent news out of China (scrapping plans for 85 new coal plants + the very strong EV mandate) I doubt there will be a lot of (smart?) money that is betting big on the future of oil...
 
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Declining Chinese Oil Production Could Help Boost Oil Prices | OilPrice.com

See my comment to this article. In short, China will lose about 240 kbpd crude production this year, but 5 million EVs should replace shortfall.

Oil and gas industry sees declining domestic production as indication that imports will continue to rise. But at a certain point China matches decline with new EVs, wind and solar.

Perhaps we can discuss when oil and gas imports to China will begin to decline. I think that will be a key moment for the market.
 
Perhaps we can discuss when oil and gas imports to China will begin to decline. I think that will be a key moment for the market.

That's indeed an interesting question. According to latest proposals, there are suggested quotas for electric cars in China:

2018: 3.4% of new cars need to be electric
2019: 6.9%
2020: 15.5%

UNEP estimates that there will be 50 Mio cars sold in China in 2020 and that the average distance traveled is 20k km / year. Assuming that the quota is met and at 5l/100km (which is aggressively low) that would be about 7.75 bn liters of fuel replaced by electricity in 2020. So I guess that would be in the neighborhood of 100 mio barrels of crude/year. That in itself is not too impressive a number. Of course that's ignoring any fuel displacement in the years leading up to that and we don't know if even tighter environmental legislation will kick-in earlier getting old cars off the road. It would be a lasting effect, i.e. the year after that level of oil displacement would be maintained.

I would need to spend a bit more time and do this properly a little later - most likely there are some errors in my estimates, too.

EDIT: and of course the big question is if any quota is going to limit the absolute growth of fuel demand efficiently i.e. if the quota is growing more than organic growth of the vehicle market or not.
 
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Thanks very much! LOWC, CRBN (even more than KLD) are indeed close to what I'm looking for. I was also hoping for an ETF based on the FFIUS but for the past two years these guys haven't delivered (they promised an ETF earlier)...

[SneakEdit: Beware of the SRI Funds (Socially Responsible Investments): they typically go by "best in class" so they have the "best" oil companies and just exclude the "worst" - which is really not helping my goal of divesting from Oil, Gas, Coal at all!]

Anyways: if $25tn is what is what the oil industry wants, then I think this will be over sooner than many of us think. We have evidence that oil consumption is not holding economic growth "hostage" any longer and we have huge oil companies paying dividends by making new dept. We have a collapsing coal industry and with the most recent news out of China (scrapping plans for 85 new coal plants + the very strong EV mandate) I doubt there will be a lot of (smart?) money that is betting big on the future of oil...

I'm still looking, but following a link further upthread got me to this idea:
Vanguard ETF list | Vanguard

Use the Vanguard sector ETF's that aren't energy (or energy and defense if that's your thing), to create your own low cost index. The Vanguard ETF's are all right around 0.10% expense level.

The Green Index Fund I followed through to a page where they indicated an expense ratio of 1.25% (much more than I'm willing to pay).
 
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That's indeed an interesting question. According to latest proposals, there are suggested quotas for electric cars in China:

2018: 3.4% of new cars need to be electric
2019: 6.9%
2020: 15.5%

UNEP estimates that there will be 50 Mio cars sold in China in 2020 and that the average distance traveled is 20k km / year. Assuming that the quota is met and at 5l/100km (which is aggressively low) that would be about 7.75 bn liters of fuel replaced by electricity in 2020. So I guess that would be in the neighborhood of 100 mio barrels of crude/year. That in itself is not too impressive a number. Of course that's ignoring any fuel displacement in the years leading up to that and we don't know if even tighter environmental legislation will kick-in earlier getting old cars off the road. It would be a lasting effect, i.e. the year after that level of oil displacement would be maintained.

I would need to spend a bit more time and do this properly a little later - most likely there are some errors in my estimates, too.

EDIT: and of course the big question is if any quota is going to limit the absolute growth of fuel demand efficiently i.e. if the quota is growing more than organic growth of the vehicle market or not.
Hmm, these numbers don't seem quite right. I'll convert to British units for comparison with other assumptions we've thrown around here.

20k km/year is about 12k miles/year. So this is what I would expect.

5l/100km is 45.6 miles/gallon. This seems rather high. US fleet average is about 25 mpg. However I would expect the Chinese fleet to have smaller, more fuel efficient cars than US. Even so, 46 mpg is rather high up the efficiency scale. Perhaps something in range of 30 to 35 mpg would be more reasonable as replacement comp.

50 million cars? I thought China was aiming for 5 million by 2020. Is there a much bigger ambition here?

Even so sticking with 5l/100km and 20k km/year, I get 1000l/year per car. Using 50 million cars, 50B l/year. Or if just 5 million cars, 5B l/year. So I don't see where 7.75B l/year is coming from.

Let's stick with 5 million cars. 5 B litres is 1.32 B gallons or 31.3 million barrels of auto fuel per year. This is also 85.8 kbpd. This is fairly modest. Two things are making this lean, assuming 45.6 mpg for displacement and that displacing 42 gallon of motor fuel displaces just one barrel of crude. Assuming, rather, 25 mpg displacement and 20 gallon of gasoline per barrel (China is exporting surplus diesel), I get to 329 kbpd or 120 million barrels crude per year. So maybe this is not too far off from your figure of 100 million barrels per year. So we are somewhere in range of 274 to 329 kbpd offset for 5 million Chinese EVs.

So let's call it about 300 kbpd for 5 million EVs. This is actually in line with the production the crude production the Chinese government is projecting out to 2020. The coincidence here leads me to suspect that the government may actually be basing there EV target on covering their shortfall in production or something close to that. It certainly would be a reasonable anchor point. They should want enough EV production not to have to increase crude imports by a substantial amount.