What’s Next for Oil: Whiplash

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This is the closest we could come to a chart showing what is next for ojl and gas prices, and how it’s going to feel. (Photo by Patrick McGarvey)

A savvy investor once told me that if you read something in the news, it is no longer true, if it ever was. I keep this in mind as I read over and over that the world is awash in 3 billion barrels of surplus oil. This glut — always and everywhere specified as 3 billion barrels — is present, the conventional wisdom (oxymoron alert) goes, because the crafty Saudis refused to cut production when the price of oil tanked (metaphor alert). They did this, it is said, to run the pesky American oil frackers out of business before they took over the world. This reminds me of the engraved plaque found in many Irish bars: “The Lord invented whiskey to keep the Irish from ruling the world.” An endearing sentiment, but probably not true.

[“The Saudis have won,” somebody said to me the other night. Really? They’re burning cash so fast that, despite having one of the world’s largest foreign-exchange reserves, they’re on course toward bankruptcy in four years. They have been forced to cut back on the subsidies that up to now have bought their subjects’ loyalty by providing them with cheap gas, electricity and water; gas prices alone have shot up 50% this year. When Iran tried that a few years ago, revolution appeared in the streets like a sudden flame, and the government reversed course immediately.

To suggest that the Middle East is a tinderbox is to understate the obvious; to say that it has become immeasurably more flammable since the Arab Spring, similarly goes without saying; and to conclude from the foregoing that this is hardly the time to thrust people more deeply into worse poverty with less hope, would not challenge the reasoning powers of a candidate for US president. The Saudi royal family is terrified and rightly so by existential threats from ISIS, Iran and increasingly its own people.]

But back to the 3 billion barrel glut. Question 1 is where did that number come from that everyone is using without qualification? Why, from the International Energy Agency (IEA), one of whose jobs is to keep track of world oil stocks. That’s oil that has been pulled from the ground but has not yet made it to a refinery: it’s in tankers, in pipelines, on rail cars and in tank farms. And it is true that IEA has just estimated those stocks at 3 billion barrels.  

BUT those stocks did not just appear because prices fell — or in order to make prices fall. If you go back ten years or more in IEA records, you find that there have always been around 2.7 billion barrels in the pipeline, so to speak. So the present number, far from representing a sudden tsunami of unwanted oil, represents an uptick of just 300 million barrels, a 10 per cent increase. It represents about a three day supply of oil at current global consumption rates.

Far from being a tsunami of excess oil swamping the world, this glut is hardly enough to get our shoes wet. There are two implications to putting this excess in its proper perspective:

1. Any return to anything like normal demand will vaporize the glut in a matter of days. Which means that’s how long it will take for prices to head back toward $100 a barrel from the current under-$40.
2. Although encouraged to ramp production back up by the return of high prices, the oil industry will not be able to. True, they can uncap sealed wells and re-erect mothballed rigs — although even doing that, which will require finding new sources of financing and hiring workers, will take a dismaying length of time. But virtually all the oil companies in the world have for years been cutting back on the money they spend looking for new oil fields. Before the price crash they were cutting back because it wasn’t working, they weren’t finding new oil no matter how much they spent. Since the price crash they’ve been cutting  back viciously because they can’t afford it. But the result is the same: there are precious few new oil wells to drill, even at a profit.

Thus the prospect of peak oil, far from having been disproved by current events, as some are gloating, hasn’t even been much delayed by current events. And if there is to be a recovery from the current doldrums of the oil industry it will be wrenching, recession-inducing recovery because we all know what economies do when oil prices spike.

On the other hand, if the economic news continues to be as bad as it is now, and the expected global depression locks most of the world’s people into long-term poverty, and their ability to buy anything continues to wither as it is withering now, why then we will be all right. With respect to peak oil.

As long as we can’t afford to buy gas, it will remain cheap. The minute we start buying it again, it will become expensive and scarce. And it will happen so fast that the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat will be simultaneous.