Read the latest insights and analysis from the experts at Oil Change International.
The prospects for the shale industry are looking increasingly bleak this year as it haemorrhages investor cash, continues to experience widespread community resistance, especially in Europe, and fails to find adequate gas reserves.
Although Canada’s controversial tar sands industry celebrated a small increase in production last year, this year’s forecast is looking gloomy, as investors continue to take flight over the climate risks and the relatively low oil price means that other oil patches look more profitable.
As US President, Donald Trump, reluctantly signs new legislation imposing sweeping new sanctions on Russia, it has been revealed that existing sanctions on the country, designed to prevent frontier oil and gas exploration, are not working.
The world’s largest listed oil company, Exxon, announced on Friday it was going to have to cut its reported proved reserves by just under a fifth. It is the biggest reserve revision in the history of the oil industry.
At the beginning of last week, environmentalists celebrated when the largest energy infrastructure company in North America, Kinder Morgan, pulled the plug on its controversial natural gas pipeline which had been proposed through parts of Massachusetts and Southern New Hampshire, called NorthEast Energy Direct.
Desperate times mean desperate measures. Something has to give. With no end in sight to the low oil price, Canadian tar sands companies are having to sell what are being described as their “jewels in the crown” in order just to survive.
Every day the low oil price is causing more pain for the oil and gas industry and no company or region is immune from the damage being caused.
For a while now a growing number of people have been asking a series of pertinent questions about Shell’s Arctic drilling operations, which could probably be boiled down to this: Why would the global oil giant risk billions of dollars of its own money, irreparable damage to a pristine environment, as well as exacerbate climate change by drilling in the Arctic for oil that we can never afford to burn?
When oil prices crashed late last year, the high-cost and capital intensive tar sands sector took a hit. The industry had already been showing signs of weakness with underperforming stocks, project cancellations, and serious concerns about market access. But low oil prices have driven a whole new level of cost cutting and project delays.
