Shell CEO says record oil not due to shortage

LONDON (Reuters) - Oil prices at a record high above $135 a barrel are rising due to market sentiment rather than a shortage of supply, Royal Dutch Shell's chief executive said on Thursday.

U.S. crude oil hit an all-time peak on Thursday, climbing to $135.09, lifted by concern about long-term supply (bullsh*t) and a host of predictions of further rises from influential investment banks and investors. (the media is peddling this fearmongering for the oil companies and banks)

"What we say and what we see is there are no physical shortages," Shell's Jeroen van der Veer told Reuters television. He runs the world's second-largest fully publicly traded oil firm by market value.

"There are no tankers waiting in the Middle East, there are no cars waiting at gasoline stations because they are out of stock. This has to do with psychology in the markets and you cannot forecast psychology".

His view that there are no shortages chimes with that of other oil producers, such as members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. Others, such as the U.S. government, say supply is tight.  (MF's are lying)

While rising prices are boosting profit for the industry, the Shell CEO agreed that high oil costs were a mixed blessing.

"For many consumers in the world, this really starts to hit them. Secondly, we see that you get a kind of public outcry.

"At the same time, the only thing that we can do is use the profits we make to invest for additional supplies."

Shell has the largest capital spending programme among its main rivals in 2008, having spent $7.6 billion (3.8 billion pounds) in the first three months of the year alone. It was also alone among its peers in boosting output.

Oil's climb has led to rising costs in the oil industry for services such as drilling rigs and companies are increasing the long-run price assumptions they use for planning their business.

Van der Veer, asked if Shell needed a price around $80 a barrel to break even, declined to give a specific figure but said it had grown more costly to bring on new supply.

"When oil prices went up, you see that the cost for new projects for the whole industry, not only for Shell, became a lot more expensive," he said.

"In our industry we see quite severe inflation. We don't know if that will plateau out or go up further."

(Reporting by Karen Noack, Writing by Alex Lawler; Editing by Peg Mackey)

The oil business is a criminal enterprise and has always been so!!  WAKE UP !!!

LINK:  https://www.prouty.org/oil.ram

Learn from the past (which we hardly ever do):

Prices and Production over a complete Hubbert Cycle: the Case of the American Whale Fisheries in 19th Century

The "bell-shaped" production curve of a non-recyclable mineral resource was described first by M. King Hubbert in 1956, and was used to correctly predict that the production of crude oil in the United States (Lower-48) would peak in 1970. It is reasonable to suppose that the worldwide production of crude oil will also follow a similar bell-curve, with much of the present debate focusing on when the peak will occur. It is anticipated that it will generate an epochal change deriving from a steep rise in prices.

The rise in prices at the peak is expected because of the switch from a market driven by production to one driven by supply. The Hubbert model, however, does not itself provide quantitative information on prices, and it is not possile to draw conclusions from individual country peaks because oil prices are set globally.

In order to obtain historical evidence for price trends, one needs to examine a case where a non-recyclable resource went through a complete Hubbert cycle worldwide. There are no previous examples of a mineral resource that has done so. In fact, crude oil may turn out to be the first, which incidentally may be one of the reasons why the concept of "peak oil" is so difficult for many people to grasp.

A resource does not need to be a mineral one to show a Hubbert curve. A biological resource which is produced (or "extracted") much faster than it is replaced may also follow a bell-curve. Historically, there have been several cases of terminally depleted biological resources. The whaling industry of the 19th Century is a good example, as already noted by Coleman (Non Renewable Resources, Oxford University Press, 4(1995) 273). The present note re-examines the whaling example with the specific objective of determining how the production peak affects prices, confirming that prices should rise after peak production.

Two species of whale: the Sperm whale and the Right whale, were hunted in the 19th Century, mainly for the oil obtainable from their fat, which was used as fuel for lamps. Whales were also hunted for so-called Whale Bone (or baleen), which was used for stiffening clothing.

The following figure summarizes the production and price data extracted from Starbuck's 1878 book (A. Starbuck, History of the American whale fishery, Seacaucus, N.J. 1878, reprinted 1989). Here, oil production is shown as the sum of the production of Sperm and Right whale oil. The indicated prices are the weighted average production of the two types of oil, corrected for inflation and translated into 2003 values, according to data by R. Sahr oregonstate.edu/dept/pol_sci/fac/sahr/sahr.htm)

From the figure, it is evident that the production of whale oil followed a bell-curve according to Hubbert's theory, modelled with a simple Gaussian curve, albeit showing strong oscillations. These data are in excellent agreement with the report on Right Whale abundance by Baker and Clapham (Trends in Ecology and Evolution Vol.19 No.7 July 2004), indicating that the fall in production after the peak was caused by depletion and not by the switching to different fuels. Indeed, "Rock oil" (or "coal oil") began to replace whale oil only in the 1860s, after the invention of the kerosene lamp by Michael Dietz in 1859. Despite the availability of kerosene, whale hunting continued well into the 1870s and 1880s, driving Sperm and Right whales to near extinction.

Turning attention to the price data, we may note first how expensive whale oil was in comparison with the crude oil that replaced it. Even at its lowest historical prices, in the 1820s, the least expensive type of oil (whale oil) was priced at more than $200 (2003$) a barrel (42 gallons). At its highest price level (1855) Sperm Whale oil sold at more than $35 (2003$) a gallon, namely almost $1500 (2003$) a barrel (!). This tells us something about how difficult it may be to substitute fossil fuels with "biofuels" (bio-ethanol, bio-diesel, or other). Without the support of fertilizers, irrigation, transportation, and agricultural machinery, which all depend on fossil fuels, biofuels would probably cost as much today as whale oil did in the 19th Century. It also shows what an incredible bonanza crude oil has been. When kerosene became first available in the 1860s, a barrel of crude oil sold for some $90 a barrel in to-day's money (data from www.wtrg.com). In the 1870-80s it had already fallen to values in the order of $20 (2003$) a barrel, comparable with modern prices. If hydrogen were to substitute gasoline today at the same price differential, it would have to cost no more than a few cents for the equivalent of a gallon. Needless to say, we aren't getting there any time soon.

Finally, we can derive insight into crude oil price trends from the figure. Whale oil prices started to increase approximately at the inflection point of the curve well and before the production peak,. An upward spike in prices took place a few years after the peak, being also detectable in the non-inflation corrected price data (see Coleman, ibid.). A somewhat surprising result is that the inflation corrected prices remained approximately constant after the peak despite the progressive depletion of whales.

In the case of crude oil, we can recognize an initial phase (up to 1971) of nearly constant prices. This phase was followed by an epoch of rising oscillation. If, as often claimed, we are close to the peak, and if the analogy with oil production holds, we may expect a further sharp increase in prices in the coming years, a trend that may, actually, have already started in 1999.