The Power and the Money

The Trump administration is not joining OPEC and the deal will not last

The United States is not joining OPEC. The United States is not leading a cartel to raise oil prices. The United States is, to quote my 5-year-old daughter, “not doing nothing.” The President of the United States is posturing.

Right now, the Trump administration is doing absolutely nothing to jawbone U.S. producers into cutting. In fact, it’s made it clear that U.S. “cuts” will come from market forces. It is remotely possibly that the Texas Railroad Commission (RRC) will order production cuts in Texas, but right now only one of the three commissioners supports the move and hearings about the idea have been contentious, to say the least. Moreover, what would be the point? If a putative 9.7 million bpd cut didn’t move markets, why would anything Texas could do make a difference?

It seems to be true that Trump worked the phones to get the Saudis to accept an agreement. But OPEC has no enforcement power and all the low-cost producers have incentives to cheat. Moreover, the deal is almost a sham. Both Russia and Saudi cut from a baseline level of 11 million bpd (the link goes to the OPEC press release) … but Saudi has never hit that level. The supposed highs of 12 million bpd included sales of stored Saudi crude. Ultimately, Saudi production will be down only 1.2 million bpd.

So good luck with enforcing that deal. As with so much of the Trump administration, this is for show. He gets to show off much he’s in with the Saudis and the Russians, and he gets to tell his backers in the oil industry that he went to bat for them. Good for him, I suppose. But it isn’t much of a cartel and the U.S. government isn’t ordering any production cuts at all. With Covid-19 having destroyed oil demand, prices are not going to go up anytime soon, least because of this deal. 

Covid-19 and American oil production, in gory institutional detail

Oil prices are crashing due to Covid-19. So what happens to American output?

Market reactions first, then political ones.

Well, first the oldest building in Dallas, circa 2019:

Yes, my shoes are bright blue.

Now market reactions to the Covid oil price crash.

Market

The “shut-in prices” is the minimum wellhead price operators need to continue producing from a production well. It’s equal to the amount needed to cover ongoing O&M, including where-necessary pumping and artificial lift, as well as water, gas and steam flooding and other secondary recovery costs.

The first wells to shut down are “stripper wells” nearing the end of their useful life. In the U.S. there are about 400,000 of these wells producing about 720,000 barrels per day. (I said they were small.) They usually rely on pumps to get the stuff out of the ground, meaning those famous mechanical donkeys you can still see in parts of California.

Next to go are wells that depend on secondary recovery. For example, in the Golden State companies inject about 400 million barrels of steam every year to get 161 million barrels of oil. (Governor Newsom has banned new wells using this technique.) These wells are high cost, but when shut down they tend to fill up fast with water. Companies that shut them down risk losing the remaining shut-in oil forever. In addition, companies that shut down wells risk losing their land leases. As a result, these wells don’t close immediately once they start losing money.

After that some wells will start to decline quickly in the absence of new drilling. Tight oil wells in North Dakota decline 65% in the first year and 77% over the first two years. That’s the next to go. In their early phase, however, tight oil wells can be easily shut-in and restarted. So tight oil production will decline in two waves, first by natural decline as new drilling collapses and then again as companies shut wells down. Since you can restart unconventional wells in about a week companies won’t be as reticent to stop production … if not for the fact that most of them are highly indebted and desperate for any sort of cash flow to satisfy demanding creditors.

This chart for tight oil plays in the Eagle Ford region of Texas gives you some idea of just how fast this decline can happen. Without new drilling, production would decline by about 700,000 bpd within a year from this play alone:

But production will decline faster than that, because unconventional wells can be shut-in fairly easily during their first year. 

In other words, the current oil price crash will cause U.S. production to drop, and drop fast. That is, it will if it is sustained. That’s not a given: countries have already begun to reopen their economies. Oil demand will recover as a result, possibly to prices that might keep tight oil production alive and stop the shuttering of stripper wells.

Political

Of course, state governments can act via a process called “proration,” whereby they can order well-by-well output cuts. Back in the 1930s, Congress passed the Connally Act, which made it illegal to ship oil across state lines in violation of state output quotas. It also created the Interstate Oil Compact Commission (here is the law), which brought representatives together from oil-producing states to hammer out overall quotas, America’s own little mini-OPEC before OPEC. (For whatever reason, Illinois and California never passed proration laws, although the California government sanctioned a quasi-private commission that functioned outside the law.)

The IOCC still exists, but its powers have withered. It no longer makes decisions by majority vote. And it now includes 31 states, five Canadian provinces, two Canadian territories, plus Egypt (W?) and the other Georgia (WT??) and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela (WTF???). Plus, while Arkansas, Colorado, Michigan, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas all passed proration laws, only Oklahoma and Texas still exercise the muscles. (The Rail Road Commission of Texas and the Oklahoma Corporation Commission still publish quotas, set above most wells’ maximum production.) Executive agencies function like muscles: use ‘em or lose ‘em. Those states would need to design regulations from scratch to impose quotas, and they would certainly be challenged in court.

Now, Texas is big enough on its own to mandate a production cut. And the Texan authorities are talking about it! But it’s all talk. And there’s no sign of the Trump administration trying to resuscitate the Depression-era laws that let it coordinate oil production cuts, or even coordinating talks among the IOCC states. But production is falling fast, so Trump could claim that he jawboned producers into it.

Hell, he could do that even if production wasn’t falling fast. That’s his M.O.

Conclusion

Which means that the ultimate question is whether OPEC wants to be fooled. If Saudi Arabia thinks that letting Mexico de facto defect while pretending to cooperate will not hurt their cartel agreement, then they’ll accept the bullshit. If they don’t, then they’ll reject the Trump-AMLO bamboozle.  

Some crude nonsense: Trump, AMLO, and OPEC

OPEC has been trying to negotiate production cuts in order to prop up oil prices. Mexico resisted making any cuts. AMLO then declared that he had asked the United States to make part of the requested cuts on Mexico’s behalf. Trump, in a press conference, announced that the U.S. would make the cuts but request “reimbursement at a later date.”

What does it all mean?

1. AMLO really loses his senses when oil is concerned. Right now, Mexico loses money on every barrel it points. Inasmuch as it is geologically possible for Pemex to cut production, Pemex should cut production. But AMLO refuses to accept that. It may be because he believes that he’s linked his reputation to increasing oil production and that failing to do so will hurt him politically. But he believes that then he is a terrible politician … and we have evidence that he is not a terrible politician. Which leaves us with the conclusion that he really like to dig hydrocarbons out of the ground and set them on fire because he likes to dig hydrocarbons out of the ground and set them on fire.
2. President Trump does not have the authority to cut U.S. oil production. Individual state governments do have that authority—the Texas Railroad Commission is famous for controlling production in that state—but there is no sign that the President intends to call in state regulators and ask them to order private producers to shut wells.
3. S. production is crashing anyway. Unconventional oil wells in the United States decline hyperbolically. That means that companies need to keep drilling just to keep up production. When prices are low, they stop drilling, and production falls. The EIA projects that U.S. production will fall by at least 500,000 barrels per day this calendar year and another 700,000 barrels in 2021. This isn’t a hard projection to make, considering as production is already down 600,000 bpd from last week.
4. AMLO is putting on a show for OPEC. He’s trying to get OPEC to pretend that a U.S. production fall that would have happened anyway is actually a deliberate action on the part of the United States to help out Mexico. OPEC knows this is bullshit, but will likely give AMLO the fig leaf he’s looking for.
5. Trump’s demand for compensation is meaningless, but not for the reasons you think. When I was a kid back in New York, we’d talk about the “favor bank.” (Often called the “Irish favor bank” for reasons I don’t understand at all.) You’d pay into the favor bank, you’d make withdrawals from the favor bank. Donald Trump has never played by the favor bank. If he wants something from you, he will do whatever he can to get it from you. If Donald Trump wants something from Mexico in the future then he will ask for it regardless of whatever “favors” he granted now. And he will threaten Mexico in order to get it. In that sense, AMLO’s request was costless.
6. OPEC wanted Mexico on board because reasons. This is the only part of the story that I don’t understand. Why couldn’t OPEC have just ignored Mexico’s posturing.

In other words, this is much ado about nothing.

In fact, if this is right, then it really was about nothing for nothing ...

 

Saudi Arabia plans to issue a statement blaming Mexico for not agreeing to cut its production (by the allocated amount of 400k) #OOTT

— Amena Bakr (@Amena__Bakr) April 10, 2020