Oil Shortage Some Day

Believe it or not the globe is headed for an oil shortage. I know many find that hard to believe, especially in this shale crazed world where there is the belief that shale oil will fill all voids, even as investment in oil exploration falls to the lowest level since the 1940s.

I am not the only one thinking this way. Dow Jones reported Amin Nasser, the chief executive of Saudi Arabian Oil Co. or Saudi Aramco, is predicting that the world is heading for an oil-supply shortage that booming U.S. shale production can’t prevent. He pointed out that in the past three years there has been a major reduction in investments in long-term crude-petroleum exploration and development projects. “The long-term situation of oil supplies…is becoming worrying,” Mr. Nasser said at the World Petroleum Congress, a large oil-industry conference in Istanbul, “the dearth of investment now would lead to fewer barrels in future, even with shale production.” He said the world needs 20 million barrels a day of new production in the next five years to meet demand. “Investments in smaller increments, such as shale oil, will just not cut it,” Mr. Nasser said according to Dow Jones.

Dow Jones said that Mr. Nasser’s concerns about oil supplies falling short are shared by the International Energy Agency, a Paris group that advises industrialized oil-consuming countries. But others such as Exxon Mobil Corp. have said technology, better methods and new, recent oil discoveries will keep supplies plentiful for the foreseeable future. Bloomberg says that Saudi Aramco, which plans what could be the world’s biggest initial public offering, will invest more than $300 billion over the next decade to maintain its spare oil-production capacity and explore for more natural gas, President and Chief Executive Officer Amin Nasser said.

Yet oil is still struggling today as a rising U.S. oil rig count off set news about OPEC nations working bywords putting a cap on Libyan and Nigerian oil output. It seems that there will be a meeting that will decide about a cap for countries without an OPEC quota and that may send a signal to the market that indeed there will be a cap on global OPEC oil output. Yet we have rising U.S. oil production and the fact that the oil rig count rose yet again by 12 rigs, 7 for oil and 5 rigs for natural gas.