a brief synopsis of the congressional trade votes and their implications, and of this week's data from the oil patch...
"We are about to be so screwed it defies the imagination." -- Tenney Naumer, "Climate Change: The Next Generation"
the entire package of trade bills, including the "fast-track" trade authority that will allow unamendable treaties to be signed for the next 6 years, passed Congress in pretty much the manner we speculated they would when we discussed them last week...on Tuesday, 13 Democrats teamed with 47 Republicans to cut off debate on the stand alone fast track bill that had passed the House on Thursday of last week, which precluded any filibuster and made way for final passage of the same bill on Wednesday by a 60 to 38 vote...at the same time they passed a renewal of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) paired with Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) for displaced workers by a voice vote after it had earlier cleared a cloture vote by a 76-22 count...then that same TAA bill, which had been defeated in the House by a 302 to 126 vote two weeks ago, passed the House by a 286-138 vote after Democratic leader Pelosi withdrew her opposition to it since the House Democrats no longer had anything to gain from holding it back...
with Trade Promotion Authority now in place, we'll probably see easy passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) between the US, Japan, and the other Pacific rim countries later this year, probably followed by the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with the European Union, and the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA) with a total of 51 countries worldwide, maybe sometime in 2016...after that, what the corporations cook up and push through during the first term of the Jeb Bush administration should bring the entire planet under the corporate-written rules, which will trump the laws of the signatory nations...my most recent rant about these trade deals is here; there's no point in warning about them again, now that they've been given the green light....in terms of how these deals will affect the fracking that is the concern of our group, the first two of these agreements will effectively mandate exports of our oil and gas resources to the signatory nations and therefore the initial signings will unleash a new torrent of oil & gas fracking activity to meet that demand, as US producers ramp up production to take advantage of higher gas and oil prices overseas; subsequently, those exports will reduce our domestic supply and correspondingly drive US energy prices up to the levels of the rest of the world...for example, as of the end of this week, import prices of LNG in Japan were $12.13 mmBTU, while the contract US natural gas price was $2.77 mmBTU; with the trade deal between the two in place, US producers will export to Japan rather than sell to US customers until those prices nearly equalize...
in the current oil & gas patch news, the past week saw the first increase since December 5th in the total number of rigs operating in the US, even though the number of oil rigs in service fell for the 29th week in a row...the rig count as reported by Baker Hughes increased by 2 to 859 rigs after dropping by 2 last week, with oil rigs down by 3 to 628 while gas rigs were up by 5 to 228 and miscellaneous rigs were unchanged at 3; those counts were down from 1558 oil rigs and 334 gas rigs a year ago, while the miscellaneous rig count rose from 1 a year ago...even with the increase, the week still saw a shift away from costly horizontal drilling, as rigs working in the major shale plays fell by 10, with the horizontal rig total falling by 8 to 654, while 7 vertical and 3 directional rigs were added, bringing the count of those types of rigs up to 107 and 98 respectively..land based rigs fell by 1 to 824, while 2 rigs were added on inland waters and one drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico was reactivated...
the increase in rigs was concentrated in Louisiana, where drillers added 6 rigs, including the 3 on water, to bring the state total to 75; while 2 rigs were added in Mississippi, which now has 3...single rigs were also added in West Virginia, which now has 20 working, Alaska, which now has 10, and New Mexico, where 44 rigs are operating...meanwhile, drillers in Ohio shut down 3 rigs, leaving 17 running, as did drillers in North Dakota, where 74 remain...two more rigs were also stacked in Texas, where they still have 361, but which is down from 889 a year ago, and a single rig was shut down in Illinois, which is back down to 2....these changes cut the rigs in the Utica shale by 3 to 19, down from 43 a year ago, reduced the Bakken shale rigs by 3 to 74, down from 178 last year, cut the Permian basin rigs by 2 to 231, down from 554, cut the Mississippian rigs by 2 to 20, down from 77 a year ago, reduced the Granite Wash rigs by 2 to 14, down from 72 a year ago, and cut one each from the Barnett and Eagle Ford shale plays, bringing the count in those basins down to 5 and 103 respectively, down from 25 and 214 respectively a year ago...meanwhile, single rigs were added in the Haynesville shale of Louisiana, where they now have 27, down from 41 a year ago, in the Marcellus, which now has 65, vs 82 a year ago, and in the Cana Woodford of Oklahoma, where they now have 33, up from 26 a year ago, as two of the three Woodford shale plays are the only basins that have seen a year over year increases in drilling rigs...
since we haven't looked at a picture of the historical track of the oil rig count in quite a while, we'll include a current version below, which comes from Friday's article on this week's rig count at the Business Insider...you'll note that the US oil rig count was below 200 for more than 3 years until horizontal drilling & fracking started taking off in 2005, and it subsequently rose to over 400 in late 2008 before the recession hit, at which time oil crashed to $35 a barrel and more than half of the rigs running then were stacked...the oil rig count then began rising again in 2009 to top 1400 in 2012 and then moved up gradually until it peaked at 1609 on October 10th of last year...as you can see, it's been all downhill from there...now we're nearly at a 5 year low; we'd have to go back to August 6, 2010 to find a week when less oil rigs were running than the 628 that were working on June 26th of this year...(btw, natural gas rigs peaked at 1,606 on August 29, 2008, after natural gas prices spiked to over $13 mmBTU, but i haven't seen a chart for that drilling crash)
meanwhile, US field production of crude oil rose during the third week in June to an average of 9,604,000 barrels per day, up from 9,589,000 barrels a day last week but short of the record pace of 9,610,000 barrels per day we saw in the first week of June; however, that was still 13.7% higher than the 8,446 ,000 barrel per day of field crude production seen in the third week of June last year...meanwhile our imports of crude oil fell by 302,000 barrels per day to 6,623,000 barrels a day in this report, after rising 444,000 barrels per day last week; while that's down 7.8% from the same week last year, weekly crude imports are so volatile that we check the weekly Petroleum Status Report (62 pp pdf) for the 4 week average, which at an average of roughly 7,000,000 barrels a day, leaves our imports 3.5% below the same 4 week period last year...with US refineries operating at a summertime 94.0% of capacity last week, gasoline production rose by 283,000 barrels per day to 9,934,000 barrels per day and our inventories of crude oil (excluding the strategic reserve) dropped for the 8th week in a row, falling by 4,934,000 barrels and leaving ending stocks 1.1% lower at 462,993,000 barrels as of June 19th; however, that's still 19.3% more oil than we had stored in the same week a year ago, and still near levels not seen at this time of year in at least the past 80 years...and as those inventories of crude are being drawn down, inventories of refined products are rising...in this most recent week, total motor gasoline inventories increased by 0.7 million barrels and are near the top of their normal range, distillate fuel inventories increased by 1.8 million barrels and are near their seasonal average and propane/propylene inventories rose 1.3 million barrels last week and are well above the upper limit of their average range..