Shale Boom 2.0: OPEC Underestimated U.S. Frackers

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)http://www.thegwpf.com

The second coming of shale could be even more powerful than the first. OPEC seems to be getting caught unawares.

The current boom in U.S. oil production is even stronger now than the run from July 2011 to April 2015. And this is with oil prices at half their previous level and before President Donald Trump has done anything to meet his pledge to “lift the restrictions on American energy and allow this wealth to pour into our communities.” Output growth could accelerate if prices rise, or costs fall further.

This is not how it was meant to be. OPEC launched a strategy to protect market share in 2014 with a specific aim to knock out high-cost oil production such as shale. After the group succumbed to internal financial pressures and agreed in November to cut output by around 1.2 million barrels a day, Saudi oil minister Khalid Al-Falih said he didn’t expect a big supply response from American shale producers in 2017.

Sources: Bloomberg; Department of Energy

It turns out the response was already well under way, and Al-Falih may not like the numbers. Data from the Department of Energy show U.S. oil production bottomed out in September. Since then oil companies have added an average of 125,000 barrels a day of production each month, taking output back above 9 million barrels a day for the first time since April.

What should really trouble OPEC, though, is that this rate of growth is even faster than the first shale boom. Over that earlier period, U.S. oil production rose at an average monthly rate of 93,000 barrels a day.

Market anticipation of the agreement between OPEC and its friends in November last year, and the actual deal, lifted WTI from a low reached in early 2016 of around $26. This time, shale producers aren’t waiting around — their output started picking up with WTI crude selling for around $45. During the last boom, WTI traded in a range at about double or triple that.

Okay, so part of the growth is coming from the Gulf of Mexico, where BP Plc’s Thunder Horse South and Royal Dutch Shell Plc’s Stones projects have both started producing in recent months. But that region also made a positive contribution to the earlier boom, as did Alaska. Most of the current growth is coming from the onshore, lower 48 states — home of the shale industry.

Increasing production from the U.S. is rapidly undermining the output cuts that OPEC is making and, unless those cuts get deeper in the coming months — which looks unlikely, given that compliance is already above 90 percent — things can only get worse for the producer group. Far from bringing the market back into balance, they run the risk that they have seriously underestimated the ability of U.S. domestic producers to adapt to lower prices. And what’s worse is that they may be able to raise production even faster if OPEC succeeds in pushing the price up.

Full story

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) http://www.thegwpf.com

February 26, 2017 at 11:11PM

Dakota Protesters Declare Victory As Pipeline’s Construction Nears Completion

via Climate Change Dispatchhttp://climatechangedispatch.com

Activists evicted from various Dakota Access Pipeline protest campsites in North Dakota are claiming victory even as the highly-contested oil project nears completion. Protesters believe they can take what they learned from the so-called anti-DAPL demonstrations and apply them to other areas of the country where pipelines are being constructed. They also believe their efforts successfully […]

via Climate Change Dispatch http://ift.tt/2jXMFWN

February 26, 2017 at 11:01PM

Claim: Public may be more accepting of advocacy by climate scientists than previously thought

via Watts Up With That?http://ift.tt/1Viafi3

From the TAYLOR & FRANCIS GROUP Public may be more accepting of advocacy by climate scientists than previously thought Research published today in Environmental Communication suggests that scientists may have more freedom than previously thought to engage in certain forms of climate change advocacy without risking harm to their credibility. The experiment, conducted by researchers […]

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February 26, 2017 at 10:59PM

Bias In Science

via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAThttps://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com

By Paul Homewood

h/t Ardy

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Quillette, the self described platform for free thought, has an interview with Clay Routledge, a social psychologist and Professor of Psychology at North Dakota State University

It covers a number of topics, but two particular sections took my eye.

Q. Let’s turn to another topic, post-modernism. Do you think that critical theory or postmodernism will ever go away? There have been attempts to discredit postmodernism before (e.g. the Sokal Affair) but nothing seems to work. What should empirically minded academics do to counter the effects of these ideas?

“I am not sure it will ever go away. The basic idea has been around in different forms for a long time. Plus, part of the appeal of this kind of scholarship is that it approaches an important point. It just makes a dramatic turn in the wrong direction before it gets there. The important point is that people are biased and this influences scientific work. I and others have written about the problem of ideological bias in the empirical sciences. However, postmodernists horribly misdiagnose the problem. Science isn’t the problem. People are the problem. Scientists are people, so they can be biased. And this undercuts our ability to develop an objective understanding of the world. This means we need to increase our efforts to remove human bias. Postmodernists oddly go the opposite direction. They increase potential bias by rejecting the methods that help reduce bias. They put their faith, and I use the term faith purposely, in subjective human experiences instead of trying to remove subjectivity from research.”

Q. You’re outspoken about left-leaning bias on campus and even in psychology. Why do you think that it is important to draw attention to this issue? And have you suffered any blowback at all for talking about it?

“As I previously noted, ideological bias can influence research and most academics, especially in the social sciences and humanities, are on the political left. This leads to groupthink and reduces the amount of scrutiny certain research receives and the debate it inspires. And it can bias every step of the research process. It can influence the choice of research questions, the way scales or questionnaires are worded, the specific outcomes measured, the decision to publish or not publish results, the amount of criticism the research receives in the peer-review process, the topics of selected research symposia at conferences, what projects receive grant funding, and so on.

Viewpoint diversity helps because we rely on peers to challenge us, to debate our ideas and point out the biases and flaws in our research. In research that does not touch on social or political issues, we often see considerable debate, people offering alternative hypotheses or questioning particulars of the research design and statistical tests. This always improves the quality of the work and helps us get closer to the objective truth. But people seem to go a little or a lot easier on research that touches on sensitive social or political topics, or supports leftist ideology. I have seen this firsthand. I have been at talks where people present very poorly conducted research related to ideas that failed to replicate or were never well-supported to begin with and watched as hardly anyone in the audience offered even the slightest challenge. It is very strange to see well-trained scientists so blatantly ignore fundamental research flaws because they find the conclusion ideologically affirming. This is precisely why we need to make our methods more rigorous, fight for an academic culture that challenges groupthink and prioritizes the pursuit of truth over tribal loyalty, and encourage diversity of thought.”

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He could have been talking about climate science.

via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT http://ift.tt/16C5B6P

February 26, 2017 at 10:57PM