Bob Tippee

Among the 21 countries able to liquefy methane and export LNG, Australia, Qatar, and the U.S. are the hands-down leaders, holding more than half the world’s liquefaction capacity among them. For now, Australia holds the top position but its capacity buildout is all but complete. While a number of liquefaction projects are planned Down Under, only one has reached the final investment decision (FID) stage in 2021, and it’s relatively small. Future growth seems much more likely to come from the two other big guns. Developers in the U.S. are cautiously thawing the plans for LNG projects they put on ice in mid-2020, when global natural gas prices slumped along with economies during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. And in February, Qatar, which was runner-up to Australian capacity until it slipped to third place due to recent U.S. additions, took FID on the first of two supersized projects to expand its LNG capacity. In today’s RBN blog, we discuss Qatar’s expansion plans and how they relate to developments elsewhere.

The November 4 decision by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its collaborators — collectively known as OPEC+ –– to stay the course on crude oil production surprised few and disappointed many. Officials from leading oil-consuming nations, including the U.S., Japan and India, want the group to relax its production restraint by more than the scheduled 400 Mb/d in December. They see extra crude supply as an antidote for high prices that have been hampering recovery from the global economic slump caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. But OPEC+ leaders made clear that they’re in no mood to accelerate their phase-out of production cuts. They know the market pressures now elevating crude prices won’t last forever and can change unexpectedly. They also face internal strains that might weaken the quota discipline that has kept the group’s supply management intact, despite the occasional upset, for nearly five years. One of those strains is the number of OPEC+ participants already producing as much crude as they can while falling short of existing ceilings — a number that grows as the ceilings rise. Today’s RBN blog looks at oil-market expectations underlying OPEC+ members’ cautious approach and at the growing divide among those unable to keep up with output targets and the relatively few but volumetrically overpowering counterparts with capacity to spare.

Producers of crude oil face historic insecurity about their market. Not only is there still uncertainty stemming from COVID, oil demand is also under pressure as governments and international organizations push to replace fossil fuels with energy forms free of hydrocarbons. Members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) face special challenges from measures taking shape to discourage oil use. Their economies, more than most others, depend on oil sales and many members of the exporters’ group have limited sources of replacement income. Yet OPEC producers do not lack leverage in a market expected to grow at diminishing rates and eventually shrink. Many of them can produce crude oil much less expensively than counterparts elsewhere and some of them plan to profit from that advantage by increasing output, even as the market flattens, and are investing to raise production capacity to ‘get while the getting is good.’ In today’s RBN blog, we look at capacity-boosting plans within OPEC, explain why most members cannot take part in the effort, and describe how this developing priority might intensify market competition.

This summer’s resurgence of the COVID-19 pandemic in many parts of the world will wreck forecasts of demand for petroleum products and, therefore, for crude oil. Most oil-market forecasts published in the first half of 2021 didn’t anticipate the 75% jump in new weekly coronavirus cases that has occurred since mid-June, or new possibilities for travel limits and other restrictions of the type that clobbered economies — and oil demand — around the globe in 2020. Obviously, swerves away from expectations for oil consumption scramble the supply-demand balances widely used in oil-market analysis. But they do happen. In fact, deviation between forecast and actual demand is the rule, not the exception. It’s just not always as extreme as the balance adjustments likely to be needed after the latest COVID surprise. Even when there’s no deadly pandemic to worry about, demand can be tricky to define, difficult to measure, and frustrating to predict. In today’s blog, we discuss the intricacies of oil-demand assessment and explain why balance calculations, based on forecasts destined to be wrong, remain meaningful to analysts mindful of their limitations.

As the outlook for crude oil in 2022 came into three-dimensional view this month, the market’s steadying mechanism managed to right itself again after another wobble. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) took its first formal look at next year in its July Monthly Oil Market Report (OMR), becoming the third of three widely watched prognosticators to do so. Among the other two, the International Energy Agency (IEA) began projecting 2022 oil-market data in its June Oil Market Report, and the intrepid U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) took its first analytical shot at next year way back in January in its Short Term Energy Outlook. The important third dimension that OPEC gave to the 2022 oil-market picture arrived on July 15 after two weeks of worry about whether production restraint by most of the group’s members and cooperating countries would survive. On July 18, though, the internal squabble driving that concern ended in a compromise that will result in production quota increases for several OPEC+ members. The 2022 projections by OPEC, IEA, and EIA, not to mention worry-driven elevation of crude oil prices prior to the compromise, make clear that the market needs OPEC+ to continue the orderly unwinding of its production cuts. In today’s blog, we compare the three forecasts and look at how the latest adjustment to OPEC+ supply management will affect the market.