A Guest Post by George Kaplan

Production

Production for June by BOEM was 1631 kbpd and by EIA 1636, compared with 1673 and 1659 kbpd, respectively, in May. The decline was mostly from Thunder Horse going offline and Constitution staying offline. Hurricane Cindy didn’t seem to have much of an impact, things will be different for the impact of Harvey on August figures.

Even with the two offline facilities coming back July numbers will struggle to beat those for March, and after that the depletion declines and hurricane disruptions take over. Note that the “others” area includes any assumptions BOEM has made to allow for missing data, which is quite a lot this month.

The combined new fields added from late 2014 are holding a plateau with South Santa Cruz and Barataria fields added and a new lease for Marmalard starting (adding about 20 kbpd combined). Stones also had a better month and achieved 70% of nameplate capacity. It’s interesting that five leases have come on line and then have effectively been killed off in this thirty month period: Amethyst (a small gas field that died after sputtering along for about six months, and not shown as the flow was so small), one lease in Lucius, Kodiak, one lease in Caesar/Tonga/Tahiti, and one in Rigel. Dalmatian South production fell immediately after start-up and was offline for a couple of months but came back in June (there are plans for subsea pumping to be installed but I don’t now the present status).

The big drops have been for BP, with Thunder Horse off line for part of June, and for Anadarko with the Constitution shut down extending into a second month (I think a bit longer than was planned).

Mature deepwater fields continue a general decline. Note for all fields there is some missing data for June and even in May – I have assumed production remains constant from the previous given month’s numbers in each case. For some reason Hess’s Tubular Bells has no reported figures for eight months now.

Shallow Fields

The shallow fields in the GoM are in steady decline for both oil and gas, but different leases are more oil and gas prone.

Production Breakdown

These charts show breakdown of production by company – most oil comes from four companies: Shell, BP, Chevron (including Union Oil) and Anadarko (their historical numbers include those for Freeport McMoRan, which they bought last year) – and by depth, which doesn’t tell me much, except maybe that ultra-deep hasn’t delivered as much as was once expected. Note these charts only go to May as June has a lot of missing data for the shallow leases (and some for May too I think, but it all comes from well numbers and there are too many to check).

Lease Expiry

BOEM provide data of when undeveloped leases have expired or will expire. There has been only one so far this year (Kaskida). However there are a lot due over the next few years, as shown below. Presumably they can be extended, though at some cost, but this may indicate a lot of development decisions (for both greenfield and browfield work) need to be made in the coming couple of years. Some of the big ones due this year are Shenandoah, North Platte and Yucatan; next year and 2019 there are a couple each in Rigel and La Femme, plus Anchor, Leon, Gibson and Samurai, and overall another six or so associated with older producing fields (i.e. that would require tie-backs or outreach drilling).

Drilling and Workovers

There are thirty rigs listed with drilling operations in the BOEM deepwater activity for 29th August, plus sixteen workover operations (in any of the charts if there is a number after a name it shows the number of well operations listed against that field). Six rigs have no field listed so are presumably wildcats. There don’t seem to be any appraisal wells in progress. Also any impacts from Hurricane Harvey aren’t apparent (the rigs that were abandoned were mostly jack-ups in shallow water so wouldn’t be included).

Off Topic Finish

This is a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller but never built. It’s computer generated from his original design drawings, although the second floor private quarters are missing. At the site below you can take a walk though the rendering. Miller didn’t like it and they couldn’t afford it.

Archilogic

I don’t know much about architecture, and I’m not sure if I even know what I like, but Frank Lloyd Wright’s work is unique, he was not much of a fan of right angles. A lot of his designs never got built (as with many architects I expect), but like this many have been rendered in graphics packages, often as an example of their capabilities. He designed a civic centre and transit building for LA, which looks a bit like the Tyrell building from Blade Runner (which, amazingly, was set in 2019 – that seemed a long way away when the film first came out), though I don’t know if it was the model for it.