Wednesday, October 22, 2014

"Oil markets: Where’d the floor go?"

Although the FT's Mr. Cotterill delivers the expected virtuoso performance, the chorus, in the guise of the comments, is where the real action is at.
Smart crowd.
From the Financial Times' Lex Live:
World crude prices have stopped falling precipitously – for now. Plenty seem to be betting that prices can rise quickly from $85 a barrel, if a ‘floor’ is not far below. Lex isn’t so sure – and in this live note will look at the winners and losers of a longer oil slump. Join us at 12pm London for the discussion.
Hello. Welcome to Lex Live – and another of Lex’s experiments in writing a note ‘live’, giving you the ability to tell us how silly we are in real-time. EXCITING!

Today we’re looking at the oil market – and essentially, whether the recent end to the slide in prices actually is much of a turning point. That means I (with my colleague Alan Livsey) will be looking at:
- How the market is positioned
- Whether supply disruptions will boost prices
- How low a price Gulf producers can get away with, fiscally
- And something of an elephant in the room – demand in Asia.
We’ve been doing a few notes recently on these subjects. So first, let me bring them up …

Firstly – Lex’s big view on the oil price collapse last week was that Asia is a large factor, actually. Not least, Saudi Arabia’s price cuts seem to have been aimed at keeping market share in Asia. Here’s a taste:
This volatility has led to attempts at psychoanalysis. Saudi price cuts are “really“ about geopolitics, Russia or finding the lowest price at which US shale production becomes unviable ($80 a barrel, supposedly).
The conspiracy theories ascribe too much power to Saudi oil production. At about 12 per cent of the global total since 1975 (except for the mid-1980s blip), Saudi share in oil is roughly equivalent to Rio Tinto’s in iron ore: another market where big players overproduce because they cannot sustain an all-powerful cartel.
There is also a simpler explanation. The market share Saudi Arabia really cares about, for the medium term, is in Asia. The region will import far more oil over the next decade.
We’re quite keen on the ‘Opec isn’t actually much of a cartel’ point. What do faulty cartels tend to do? Overproduce.

But here’s a contrary view, via Oxford Energy today – Opec at least isn’t in as bad a spot as it was in the 1980s, when oversupply in the oil market really did blow up prices quite badly.
I guess the standard objection here is would be that ten years is nothing to the Saudis. They want a market that is oversupplied for a sustained enough period that lots of investment in marginal supply, from Iraq to the US, is dropped
Well, you can also see the point made by Oxford Energy there about the outlook for demand looking better in 2014 vs, say, 1984. Which would help Saudi while it’s busy knocking out swing barrels in shale.
...MUCH MORE