ODAC News – Mon 12 Mar
1/ Ethanol-driven
feed costs cut
2/ The new Seven Sisters: oil and gas giants dwarf western
rivals (The Financial Times, Sun 11 Mar)
3/
4/ German
radio programme on Peak Oil in the
5/
6/ The Russian-Iranian Energy Relationship (
7/ Growing costs ‘put Shetland oilfield
plans in jeopardy’ (The Times [
1 ton of crude = approx 7.3 barrels of oil (6.6-8.0
bbl. of crude oil with 7.333 bbl. taken as average)
100 million tonnes/year = 2 million barrels/day
(approx)
mbd OR mn b/d
OR Mb/d = million barrels per day
mn cf/d OR
Mcf/d = million cubic feet per day
Quotations from articles are now always in this type
of chevron: <<>>
If an ODAC comment is within an article, it will begin
with: ODAC:
where appropriate for clarification.
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1/ Ethanol-driven
feed costs cut
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070311/sc_nm/usa_crops_dc_1
<< High feed costs, created by the explosive growth of
the fuel ethanol industry, will lower U.S. beef and broiler chicken output this
year by a quarter billion lbs from earlier forecasts, the U.S. government said
on Friday.
... The Agriculture Department said beef output would
dip by 62 million lbs and chicken by 124 million lbs from last month's
estimate, with total red meat and poultry production forecast for 90.359
billion lbs. Cattle, hog and poultry feeders say abrupt increases in feed costs
-- predominantly corn -- are squeezing their operations.
Producers will send fewer animals to slaughter and at
lower prices this year, said USDA. Both are ways to use less feed. Corn prices
have doubled since last fall. The ethanol industry is expected to use 2.15
billion bushels of the 2006 corn crop and 3.2 billion bushels of this year's
crop.
"The decline in beef carcass weights reflects
several factors, including higher feed costs, harsh winter weather and
higher-than-expected first quarter beef slaughter," said USDA. Based on
low slaughter numbers in January, broiler output was expected to fall in the
first half of this year but rebound in the final half.
It was the second month in a row that USDA lowered its
forecast for beef and broiler production in 2007. In February, it reduced its
beef estimate by 60 million lbs, saying "relatively high grain prices will
encourage cattle to remain on grass longer" and result in lower beef
production. USDA shaved its broiler forecast by 163 million lbs because fewer
chicks were being hatched... >>
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2/ The new Seven Sisters: oil and gas giants dwarf western
rivals (The Financial Times, Sun 11
Mar)
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/471ae1b8-d001-11db-94cb-000b5df10621.html
<<When an angry Enrico Mattei coined the phrase
“the seven sisters” to describe the Anglo-Saxon companies that controlled the
Middle East’s oil after the second world war, the founder of Italy’s modern
energy industry could not have imagined the profound shift in power that would
occur barely half a century later.
As oil prices have trebled over the past four years, a
new group of oil and gas companies has risen to prominence. They have consolidated
their power as aggressive resource holders and seekers and pushed the world’s
biggest listed energy groups, which emerged out of the original seven sisters –
ExxonMobil and Chevron of the
The “new seven sisters”, or the most influential
energy companies from countries outside the Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development, have been identified by the Financial Times in
consultation with numerous industry executives. They are Saudi Aramco,
Overwhelmingly state-owned, they control almost
one-third of the world’s oil and gas production and more than one-third of its
total oil and gas reserves. In contrast, the old seven sisters – which shrank
to four in the industry consolidation of the 1990s – produce about 10 per cent
of the world’s oil and gas and hold just 3 per cent of reserves. Even so, their
integrated status – which means they sell not only oil and gas, but also
gasoline, diesel and petrochemicals – push their revenues notably higher than
those of the newcomers.
Robin West, chairman of PFC Energy, an industry
consultancy, says: “The reason the original seven sisters were so important was
that they were the rule makers; they controlled the industry and the markets.
Now, these new seven sisters are the rule makers and the international oil
companies are the rule takers.” ...>>
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3/
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2348
A fairly short article:
<<When a fire becomes sufficiently intense, its
heat creates a rising column of air so strong that surrounding air is drawn
into the void, creating a draft that sustains and intensifies the fire. It
becomes a self-sustaining, self-intensifying organism: a firestorm. The
violence in
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4/ German
radio programme on Peak Oil in the
http://www.wdr5.de/sendungen/feature/855366.phtml
Paul Nellen writes from
<<Here's my new radio show (54 minutes) on
current Peak Oil discussions in the
German speaking ODAC info readers might be perhaps
interested to listen to it.>>
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5/
http://www.platts.com/Oil/News/8929272.xml?p=Oil/News&sub=Oil&src=energybulletin
“The first component is expanding production capacity
to the 4 million target from around 2.8 million b/d
currently”. An extra 1.2 Mb/d over 13 years does not seem so cheery as the
headline makes out – how much new oil production will the world need over the
same time frame – 30-50 Mb/d ? And what will happen to
<<OPEC producer Kuwait is determined to proceed
with an $8 billion project to raise the crude oil production capacity of its
northern fields to 900,000 b/d with the help of foreign oil companies as part
of a plan to raise overall capacity to 4 million b/d by 2010, a senior Kuwaiti
oil official said Monday.
"We recognize that worldwide energy consumption
is projected to increase by almost 50% in the next quarter century, and most of
these additional barrels of oil are to come from the Gulf producers,"
Nawaf al-Sabah, deputy managing director and general counsel of the Kuwait
Petroleum Corporation, told an energy conference.
"To meet this challenge, we are implementing a
business strategy that will take us to the year 2020 and beyond," he said,
adding that this strategy was made up of four components, including the
expansion of state-owned KPC's international operations.
The first component is expanding production capacity
to the 4 million target from around 2.8 million b/d
currently, Sheikh Nawaf said.
"This four million b/d figure would match the
production figures from the mid-1970s, but while the oil production at that
time came solely from easy to produce reservoirs, the incremental production
that would take us to 4 million b/d by 2020 is slated to come from difficult
reservoirs," he explained at the seminar organized by the Baker Institute
and devoted to the results of a study on national oil companies… >>
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6/ The Russian-Iranian Energy Relationship (
http://www.mees.com/postedarticles/oped/v50n11-5OD01.htm
<<Are Russia and Iran, with 20% and nearly 50%
of the globe’s proven oil and gas reserves, likely to develop a policy of
coordination of production and exports, potentially influencing global prices
and/or supply, to the detriment of energy consumers? In a world where energy importing countries
are newly concerned about security of global supply, this has become a legitimate
question.
This author would argue that if one examines past
history, current Russian and Iranian national interests, and the complexities
surrounding their modern bilateral relations, it is difficult to envision
It is fundamental to remember that
[main part of article. Last
paragraph: ]
... One element influencing Russian-Iranian bilateral
relations, if inadvertently, is the
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7/ Growing
costs ‘put Shetland oilfield plans in jeopardy’ (The
Times [
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/natural_resources/article1499942.ece
<<The accelerating cost of producing oil and gas
from new frontiers is hindering the development of vital reserves west of
Shetland, one of the world’s top oil barons claims.
Christophe de Margerie, the chief executive of
He said: “These fields are extremely difficult to
produce. The cost of developing fields is so high that, given existing gas
prices, these new fields are marginal.”
... Analysts at Merrill Lynch, the investment bank,
said: “
... Mr de Margerie repeated his scepticism about
International Energy Agency (IEA) predictions of oil output of 120 million
barrels per day by 2030. “There is no chance,” he said.
Further warnings about the impact of rising costs on
the oil and gas industry came last week from the Centre for Global Energy
Studies (CGES), which revealed that nonOpec oil production last year rose by
only 450,000 barrels per day, a fraction of the 1.5 million bpd predicted by
forecasters.
“The oil industry is finding it harder and harder to
expand upstream capacity,” the CGES writes in its Global Oil Report.
“Development costs are up sharply, essential equipment and skilled labour are
in short supply and governments want a bigger share of the proceeds. As a
result, projects take longer to complete and output is growing more slowly than
predicted.” >>
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