The Weekly Wrap: October 15, 2010
CNOOC, Statoil Invest $1 billion in south Texas’ Eagle Ford oil shale. Guess who will be scrutinized and who won’t? The betting is that the Chinese National Offshore Oil Corp. will not suffer another fiasco like in 2005, when it lost in its attempt to land Unocal. This time it will manage to hold on ...
CNOOC, Statoil Invest $1 billion in south Texas' Eagle Ford oil shale. Guess who will be scrutinized and who won't? The betting is that the Chinese National Offshore Oil Corp. will not suffer another fiasco like in 2005, when it lost in its attempt to land Unocal. This time it will manage to hold on to its investment, in this case a $1.1 billion buy-in into the scorching hot shale bonanza. Yet some analysts say that election-year jingoism in the United States could again leave China out in the cold. Ditching the deal will be difficult, however, since it was announced on the same day -- Oct. 10 - that Norway's Statoil unveiled its own, $1.3 billion deal with Talisman involving another section of the Eagle Ford field. Given the continued interest of U.S. energy companies in China, the Administration and Congress may have to tough out any instinct to scuttle the CNOOC project.
CNOOC, Statoil Invest $1 billion in south Texas’ Eagle Ford oil shale. Guess who will be scrutinized and who won’t? The betting is that the Chinese National Offshore Oil Corp. will not suffer another fiasco like in 2005, when it lost in its attempt to land Unocal. This time it will manage to hold on to its investment, in this case a $1.1 billion buy-in into the scorching hot shale bonanza. Yet some analysts say that election-year jingoism in the United States could again leave China out in the cold. Ditching the deal will be difficult, however, since it was announced on the same day — Oct. 10 – that Norway’s Statoil unveiled its own, $1.3 billion deal with Talisman involving another section of the Eagle Ford field. Given the continued interest of U.S. energy companies in China, the Administration and Congress may have to tough out any instinct to scuttle the CNOOC project.
IEA Bumps Up Oil Demand Forecast for 2010, 2011. The Paris-based International Energy Agency lent credence to those who believe that the global economy is slowly recovering with its much-watched oil report. The agency said increased demand in both developing and industrialized countries means the world will use 86.9 million barrels a day this year, 300,000 barrels a day higher than previously forecast, and a full 1.5 million barrels a day more than last year’s recessionary pullback. Next year, the IEA predicts, demand will rise another 1.3 million barrels a day. What does this mean? Not lower gasoline prices at the pump, that’s for sure. Possibly, however, that the record inventories of oil around the world will start falling, and put a floor under what this year has been a volatile market. Reports by Deutsche Bank, France’s Total and a couple of think tanks have foreseen comparatively high oil prices headed into the middle of the decade, before falling again, and this could be the start of that climb.
Oil: another target in the Afghan war. Militants linked to the Taliban have spent much of the last 10 days or so blowing up NATO oil and fuel tankers plying routes from Pakistan into Afghanistan. Today there was another attack in the Khyber Pass leading from the Pakistani city of Peshawar into eastern Afghanistan near Jalalabad, where two died in an attack on a NATO fuel truck. It is a time-tested strategy — war combatants have been targeting each other’s fuel supplies ever since Winston Churchill triggered the age of strategic oil just before the outbreak of World War I. Over at Wired‘s Danger Room blog, Katie Drummond writes of a three-mile-long jam of NATO fuel trucks on the very same route (the piece includes must-see satellite images of the bottleneck by DigitalGlobe).
Moratorium lifted in the Gulf of Mexico. Taking no chances with control of Congress on the line in Washington, President Barack Obama lifted a moratorium on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico more than a month before scheduled. Six months after five million barrels began spilling into the Gulf from BP’s Macondo well, the administration said that oil companies again can drill in both shallow and deep water, though under a tighter regulation regime, and with more surprise inspections. At Investing Daily, Jim Fink calls it Obama’s "October Surprise." But Obama was wrong if he thought the move would silence the hecklers. Over at the State Column, a still-dissatisfied Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal took a swipe at Obama and his "harsh," "job-killing," "arbitrary," and "capricious" decisions regarding the Gulf.
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