refinery demand

After the crude oil price crash in the spring of 2020 and flat-at-$40/bbl oil last summer and early fall, prices for both WTI and Brent have been increasing steadily the past several months, and now stand at a kind-of-remarkable $75/bbl. This rise has been driven by a combination of demand recovery and supply restraint from both OPEC+ and U.S. producers — which begs the questions: what’s next on the supply and demand fronts, and how much more will oil prices increase from here? There’s been a lot of chatter lately that we might see $100/bbl crude prices sometime soon, and there are a lot of interested parties — many of whom don’t normally see eye-to-eye — who, for one reason or another, see their interests converge around the $100/bbl mark. The only problem is, it’s not showing up in the forward curve. Today, we look at the potential for “Benjamin-a-barrel” oil and how it might play out.

Canada’s energy sector has been hit hard by the recent oil price collapse that was initially set off by the now-ended Saudi Arabia-Russia price war and made much worse by the demand-destroying effects of the global COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns. The impacts on Canada’s crude oil and natural gas sectors have been both dramatic and nuanced. For example, oil supply cutbacks have been rapid and substantial, while there has been virtually zero impact on natural gas supplies. Oil demand has been similarly affected, with refined product demand seeing a large swoon, while natural gas demand has suffered only a modest pullback. And for Canada’s energy exports, these have experienced some jolting swings in a matter of weeks, putting the whole sector under pressure to adapt where possible. Today, we highlight some of the recent market disruptions and their implications.

With a dwindling market for their crude, many U.S. producers are confronting an unavoidable choice: shutting in existing production. Just go out and flip a switch and turn a valve, right? Wrong. Like everything else in the COVID era, shutting in production is complicated. It is the alternative of last resort for producers, whose primary directive is the economic extraction of oil and gas. But with demand for their products crushed, production from some wells no longer makes economic sense. Unfortunately, the process of shutting in wells is charged with contractual, economic and operational issues that the industry is scrambling to deal with. The situation is fraught with uncertainty, and many producers’ futures depend on how decisively they manage the shut-in process. Today, we discuss the urgent need to reduce oil production and the judgments producers will be making as they take wells offline.