What’s Next For Oil: Interview With Former DoE Chief Of Staff

In this week’s MacroVoices podcast, Erik Townsend and Joe McMonigle, former chief of staff at the US Department of Energy, discuss the state of the global energy market, and OPEC’s rapidly diminishing ability to control oil prices. McMonigle believes investors will be hearing more jawboning from the Saudis, OPEC’s de-facto leader, over the next two weeks as they try to marshal support for extending the cartel’s production-cut agreement past a March 2018 deadline.

Of course, anyone who’s been paying attention knows the cuts have done little to alleviate supply imbalances that have weighed on oil prices for years. In a report published by the International Energy Agency earlier this month, the organization notes that non-compliance among OPEC members, and non-members who also agreed to the cuts those non-members who also agreed to cut oil production, increased again in July. According to the IEA data, non-compliance among the cartel’s members rose to 25 percent in July, the highest level since the agreement was signed in January. Meanwhile, noncompliance for non-members rose to 33%.

Given that oil prices have fallen since OPEC members and non-members first agreed on the cuts last November, the Saudi’s might have difficulty convincing their peers that the cuts are having an impact, other than allowing US shale producers to flourish.

OPEC will meet Nov. 30 in Vienna.

Erik: Joining me now as this week’s featured interview guest is former US Department of Energy Chief of Staff Joe McMonigle, who now heads up the energy research team at Hedgeye. Joe, I think everybody understands that the key question in today’s oil market is whether the rebalancing that OPEC production cuts were supposed to achieve is really happening or if the supply glut is actually still continuing. So let’s start with your high-level view first. Is OPEC effectively managing supply or are they really just managing market sentiment?

Joe: I think, to date, they have been managing sentiment and, of course, engaging in verbal intervention in the market. Yes, they did do this production cut deal a year ago—well, actually last November. They’re eight months into that deal now, and it’s really had not that much of an impact on the market. I think, originally, when the deal was announced, I think oil bulls really liked the idea and prices were boosted as a result. But many people, a lot of very savvy oil analysts and forecasters at banks, predicted big inventory draws in the spring that just never materialized. And, of course, the return of higher prices has incurred shale to rise—which, of course, we can get into later because It’s sort of a different phenomenon. But, just to really judge the effectiveness of the production cut deal, last Friday oil ended at—or settled at—47 and some change. It was actually a penny lower than it was a year ago.

So, just to judge—obviously, prices in the last couple days have fluctuated a little bit—but, really, if you’re looking at where prices were a year ago versus where they are today, I don’t think you can really say that the production cut deal has had a lot of influence or has been very effective. And I think as a result the markets started out really impressed, and I think they’ve been pretty disappointed as we’re into month eight now, almost nine months of the deal.”