Jeffrey J. Brown

To discuss the ramifications from these storms on the oil markets, geoscientist and oil explorer Jeffrey Brown returns to the podcast. He calculates that Harvey alone will have long-lasting effects such as lingering supply shortages, but his greater focus is attuned to the growing validation of his Export Land Model, which calculates the rate at which oil-producing nations cease to become net exporters as their domestic consumption increases.

I realize that this is a controversial assertion–that Saudi Arabian oil fields are not infinite–but it’s a possibility that is at least worth considering. 

At a 10 percent /year decline rate, in order to simply maintain a production rate of 7.5 million b/d out to 2023, the US oil industry would have to replace the productive equivalent of every single oil field in the United States of America…

In this paper, I briefly review recent global crude oil and liquids production numbers, and I review the Export Land Model (ELM). I also introduce the concept of the Export Capacity Index (ECI), which is simply the ratio of total petroleum liquids production to liquids consumption in net oil exporting countries. I then compare the ELM to actual case histories, and I discuss Global Net Exports of oil (GNE) and what I call Available Net Exports (ANE), or GNE less the Chindia (China + India) region’s combined net oil imports.

Americans are reading, almost on a daily basis, about increasing oil and gas production in the US. For example, Daniel Yergin wrote about his optimistic outlook for increasing US oil and gas production in an OpEd piece in the June 10, 1012 New York Times entitled “Americas New Energy Reality.”

It’s certainly true that US oil and gas production has rebounded from the production low following the 2005 Gulf of Mexico hurricanes, but a careful analysis of the production data suggests that the production outlook it not quite as rosy as most people seem to believe.

“It’s no pipe dream. The U.S. is already the world’s fastest-growing oil and natural gas producer. Counting the output from Canada and Mexico, North America is “the new Middle East,” Citigroup analysts declare in a recent report.”

Jeffrey Brown responds: The Texas Railroad Commission (RRC) sums the reported production from Texas producers, and it has been doing so far decades, while the EIA apparently uses a sampling approach to estimate Texas production. For annual production in 2011, the RRC shows Texas crude oil production at 1.12 mbpd (million barrels per day), while the EIA shows it at 1.46 mbpd, a gap of 340,000 bpd. The gap between the RRC and the EIA for monthly production is even more pronounced, on the order of about 500,000 to 600,000 bpd.

If the EIA is this far off for Texas, what about the other producing states, and what does it say about the EIA’s global data?