Oil and Gas Issues

[Sigmetnow]

Examining the reasons for the inevitable death of coal, oil, and natural gas.

The Doom Of Fossil Fuel Investments

The fossil fuel investment sector is doomed. The doom is already here for coal companies. For oil companies, doom will come within 10 years, but it could be as early as next year — markets are forward-looking and stock investments may well collapse before that. The natural gas business becomes doomed when oil dies.

It is unwise to invest any portion of any conservatively managed portfolio in pure-play fossil fuel stocks, or in stocks with the majority of their projected profits from fossil fuel operations. These businesses are dying.
...
The Rockefeller Brothers Fund was founded by descendants of J D Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil, using the money from Standard Oil. They divested starting in September 2014, and their investment performance has improved.

The words of Rockefeller Brothers Fund chairman Stephen Heintz should be heeded: “I’m convinced that if [J.D. Rockefeller] were alive today, he’d be looking out to the future and investing in clean energy technology.”

https://cleantechnica.com/2018/11/18/the-doom-of-fossil-fuel-investments/

[Sleepy]

_{Early oil industry knowledge of CO2 and global warming
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0349-9}

[TerryM]

Thanks Sleepy!


By 1954 Big Energy knew that they were peddling products that were altering the earth's atmosphere.
For the next >60 years they denied this reality.


Special places in Hell seem appropriate.
Terry

[Sleepy]

Thanks Sleepy!


By 1954 Big Energy knew that they were peddling products that were altering the earth's atmosphere.
For the next >60 years they denied this reality.


Special places in Hell seem appropriate.
Terry

Couldn't agree more, Terry. There's more in that paper, even Humble Oil (cough) made some early investigations:

In 1955, the API began funding the proposed research at Caltech under the name Project 53. The project focused on uranium–lead dating, yet work on carbon continued, at least for a time: later that year, the researchers told the API that they were using their mass spectrometer to make around 2,300 measurements on CO₂ per year. The results were not published.
Others began examining fossil fuel emissions using carbon isotopes in tree rings. Hans Suess, in 1955, gave a low estimate of atmospheric fossil carbon of less than 1%. Suess’s work was expanded in 1957 by H. R. Brannon of Humble Oil Company (now ExxonMobil), who found higher concentrations of 3.5%. Brannon knew of Harrison Brown's unpublished work, compared results and found that they agreed.

[longwalks1]

Had to download the .ris to get the DOI  - I never knew what an ris file was until 5 minutes ago.

DOI  10.1038/s41558-018-0349-9    and the "Hub"   will get you the article - actually a corresondence/

Or you can pay $9 to a corporation for less than 2 pages.    I have sent a little money to the "Hub"

[Sigmetnow]

"We are entering an unprecedented period of uncertainty in oil markets," IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol told a conference in Norway on Monday.

Oil drops 4 pct as equities slide sparks demand worries

November 20, 2018, 11:20:00 AM EDT

* Stock markets fall amid gloomy trade outlook

* Cautious investors have pulled large investments out of oil

* IEA boss warns oil markets face "unprecedented uncertainty"

* U.S. crude stocks likely up for 9th week - poll

https://www.nasdaq.com/article/oil-drops-4-pct-as-equities-slide-sparks-demand-worries-20181120-00812

[sidd]

Bonesaw losing support: senior royals push alternative candidate for succession

https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-saudi-khashoggi-royals-exclusive/after-khashoggi-murder-some-saudi-royals-turn-against-kings-favourite-son-idUKKCN1NO2KF

sidd

[sidd]

Aramco withdraws 70 B US$ bond sale, finds no suckers.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/11/saudi-arabia-halts-plan-massive-corporate-bond-sale-wsj-181120013924565.html

sidd

[Shared Humanity]

Worldwide oil consumption continues its unrelenting rise.

https://ycharts.com/indicators/world_oil_consumption

https://www.iea.org/oilmarketreport/omrpublic/

[Tor Bejnar]

Almost $50 West Texas Intermediate - wow.

[gerontocrat]

Almost $50 West Texas Intermediate - wow.

Trumponomics rule, OK. He let Iran off the hook by granting waivers, so Iran's exports of oil is still holding up after Saudi and Russia thought they had the green light to turn the faucets up to full on.

There are a lot of US shale oil producers who have been burning cash something awful who were looking a bit sick this Thanksgiving Thursday, and even sicker this Black Friday.

Simpler to have Trump as your enemy. He seems to have a habit of stiffing his "friends".

[magnamentis]

Almost $50 West Texas Intermediate - wow.

Trumponomics rule, OK. He let Iran off the hook by granting waivers, so Iran's exports of oil is still holding up after Saudi and Russia thought they had the green light to turn the faucets up to full on.

There are a lot of US shale oil producers who have been burning cash something awful who were looking a bit sick this Thanksgiving Thursday, and even sicker this Black Friday.

Simpler to have Trump as your enemy. He seems to have a habit of stiffing his "friends".

there is a saying where i come from that goes like this:

if you have such a friends you don't need any enemies

most probably this exists in one or another way in many languages and it especially applies to politics (so called political friends)

[etienne]

there is a saying where i come from that goes like this:

if you have such a friends you don't need any enemies

most probably this exists in one or another way in many languages and it especially applies to politics (so called political friends)

It's a little bit out of topic, but I have often seen that to be "friends" tend to be more useful for the most powerful one. The one get help, the other the honor.

At work, when we get a friendly price on a product, we sometimes check who is the friend.

There is also a joke about brotherly sharing, because 50-50 is often better.

[Sigmetnow]

Texas Is About to Create OPEC's Worst Nightmare

- Total U.S. production rising at fastest pace in 98 years

- Pipeline bottleneck in Texas set to ease by end of 2019

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-21/opec-s-worst-nightmare-the-permian-is-about-to-pump-a-lot-more

[etienne]

There is a book that has just been transalted that should be quite good on the subject :
Oil, Power, and War: A Dark History from Mathieu Auzanneau.
To have a french book translated in English, it must be quite good. I asked the french version to Santa Claus (well, somebody will help him).
The guy has a blog in french : http://petrole.blog.lemonde.fr/

Peeking at Peak Oil from Kjell Aleklett must also be good. Didn't get it yet.

[Red]

Looks like more of the same, FF companies ignoring the hard science and running with the hopium!

Oilsands waste is collected in sprawling toxic ponds. To clean them up, oil companies plan to pour water on them
The oil industry’s strategy to deal with a trillion litres of toxic goop is centred on a process even the Alberta Energy Regulator calls unproven. One top scientist describes the claim that water capping will return land to a natural state an an “impossible fantasy.”
FORT MCMURRAY, ALTA.—The toxic waste of the Canadian oilpatch has been quietly spreading in the boreal forest since bitumen mining began here in the 1960s.

The yogurt-like mix of clay, water, toxic acids, metals and leftover bitumen has sprawled in artificial ponds to cover an area twice the size of the city of Vancouver.

More than one trillion litres of the goop, called tailings, fill these man-made waste lakes that can be seen from space. An equivalent amount of water would take five days to tumble over Niagara Falls.

The contaminated tailings ponds attract and kill migrating birds. They emit methane and other greenhouse gases.

Despite years of public promises from officials that the tailings ponds would shrink and go away, they are growing. And in the meantime, troubling gaps are opening in the oversight system meant to ensure the oilpatch cleans up its mess. Alberta has collected only $1 billion from companies to help remediate tailings — a problem that is now estimated to cost about 100 times that.

https://www.thestar.com/news/investigations/2018/11/23/oilsands-waste-is-collected-in-sprawling-toxic-ponds-to-clean-them-up-oil-companies-plan-to-pour-water-on-them.html

[sidd]

Saud is screwed. Trump laid out the deal. Pump oil, keep prices down, else i drop the Bonesaw tapes. Except I'm not sure Saudi state budget can survive 60US$/bbl prices at any attainable volume.

Bonesaw is caught in webs of his own making. His Aramco float was nixed by his father, the King, once he saw the true state of Aramco. Now Aramco bond offering got axed by the bankers too. And the King has refused to sell out the Palestinians in Bonesaw-Israel plan. Unfortunately for  Bonesaw, his father is his sole remaining supporter after Yemen war debacle, money grab at the Ritz, and now, Khashoggi fallout.  So the fallback of deposing daddy and asserting sole control is beginning to look shaky.

Bonesaw might wanna stick close to home, rather than leave for G20 Argentina meet at the end of this month. I seem to hear knives being sharpened.

sidd

[Tor Bejnar]

Federal Lands Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sequestration in the United States: Estimates for 2005–14
a USGS publication

Washington Post did a review:

…
A new report from the U.S. Geological Survey found the extracting and burning of fossil fuels from federal lands made up nearly a quarter of all carbon dioxide emissions in the United States between 2005 and 2014.
…
It was released on the same Friday the administration published an even larger interagency report outlining the severe economic toll climate change is projected to exact on the nation as the threats of coastal flooding and forest fires rise. Trump administration critics accused political appointees of trying to bury that report on Black Friday.
…
In a first-of-its-kind report, the agency found that the consumption of coal, oil and gas from federal onshore and offshore holdings represented 23.7 percent of carbon dioxide emissions nationwide on average over the 10-year period studied.  Fossil fuels from federally controlled areas account for much smaller portions — 7.3 percent and 1.5 percent — of methane and nitrous oxide emissions, respectively.
...

[TerryM]

sidd
I believe that our beloved Prince has been given a pass for even more egregious acts in the past.


That the West has rather arbitrarily chosen to draw attention to this particular grizzly event may say more about America's apparent success with her fracking programs than the gruesome dismemberment of a WaPo stringer.


Turkey, Trump and probably any number of others are extorting everything they can from the Prince. At some point his Regal father may decide that the Kingdom is paying too high a price and will cut away the flotsam that may capsize his Ship of State.


Terry

[Sigmetnow]

Oil Has Nowhere to Go But Down
November 28, 2018, 11:56:59 AM EDT By dkorth@finsum.com (FINSUM), FINSUM
(Riyadh)

The oil market has been in an extremely rough patch over the last several weeks. Just a couple months ago, many were talking about the return of $100 oil. Suddenly, prices are just half that. The question is where is crude headed next. Well, the Saudis seem committed to keeping it weak, as the Kingdom, which leads OPEC, has just announced that it will not cut production. The catch is that it said it will not do so alone, which keeps the door open to another coordinated OPEC-wide cut, such as happened several months ago.

FINSUM : The big difference between a coordinated cut now and the one from a couple years ago is that the world looks much closer to recession a present, which means demand could flatten or fall even if output lowers. That means producers could lose revenue by cutting (instead of the difference being made up by price gains), which makes a big difference.

https://www.nasdaq.com/article/oil-has-nowhere-to-go-but-down-cm1061794

[etienne]

You can also find articles saying the opposite, like here :
https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2018/11/for-whom-peak-oil-is-coming-if-you-own.html
Somehow, I don't believe either the ones who say that there is enough oil, nor the one saying that the trouble is for now, but I believe that renewable energy is not just supported because of climate change. I find that the climate politics regarding oil in the EU really look like peak oil politics.

[sidd]

Natgas pipeline spills in PA and OH:

--
... more than 800 state and federal permit violations ...

... violations included spills of drilling fluid, a clay-and-water mixture that lubricates equipment for drilling under rivers and highways; sinkholes in backyards; and improper disposal of hazardous waste and other trash. Fines topped $15 million.

... discharge of drilling fluids into state waters without a permit ...

 “made deliberate managerial decisions to proceed in what appears to be a rushed manner in an apparent prioritization of profit over the best engineering.”

“The violations are really meaningless to them,”

--

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-pipelines-etp-violations-insight/two-u-s-pipelines-rack-up-violations-threaten-industry-growth-idUSKCN1NX1E3

sidd

[Tor Bejnar]

From Bloomberg

Oil rose above $50 a barrel in New York, erasing an earlier loss, after a report that Russia accepts the need to cut production in conjunction with OPEC.

All eyes are on this weekend’s G20 summit in Argentina, where Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman are likely to discuss how to coordinate oil policy. The nations are in talks over the timing of any reduction in supply, Reuters reported Thursday, a week before producers are due to meet in Vienna next week to discuss policy for 2019.
…

I watched intermittently yesterday, and didn't notice the price dropping below $50.  Oh well...

[etienne]

Qatar is leaving the OPEC
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/dec/03/qatar-pulls-out-of-opec-to-focus-on-gas-production

I guess they don't have enough oil anymore. They never had much of it (they are a LNG producer), so it probably doesn't make sense for them to stay in an oil Cartel.

I also heard somewhere that the US would like to make some legal complain about OPEC unfair trade practices, which is quite ironical because the first to do it was the Standard Oil, then the Texas Railroad Commission until the US passed the peak oil. After the US, the OPEC did the job. Oil market needs to be regulated otherwise prices wouldn't be stable enough compared to the investments needed to get it out of the ground.

The book "Oil, Power, and War: A Dark History" written by Mathieu Auzanneau is really interesting, I am now just after WWII.

 

[Sebastian Jones]

Oil market needs to be regulated otherwise prices wouldn't be stable enough compared to the investments needed to get it out of the ground.

It appears that the Canadian province of Alberta agrees, it is curtailing the production of oil in the province because unregulated, a glut has overwhelmed export facilities. Alberta concentrates on exporting raw product rather than refining it at home, so it is at the mercy of foreign refiners to accept and market  its product.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/notley-oil-cuts-1.4929489

[Tor Bejnar]

I noticed West Texas Intermediate was over $53 a day or two ago.  Back under $51.

[Tor Bejnar]

Back up to $54 all ready.  My, my.

[Sigmetnow]

Canadian Natural (CNQ) Slashes Capex Amid Pipeline Pinch - Nasdaq.com

Notably, Canadian Natural is the first major company in Canada to slash its 2019 capex. In fact, considering the current state of affairs in the Canadian oil industry, it would not come much as a surprise if most of its peers like Imperial Oil Limited IMO , Suncor Energy Inc SU , Cenovus Energy Inc CVE , among others, make similar capex-cut announcements.

Although the company has stated its plans to ramp up spending levels, in case the crude prices in Canada witness a rebound or energy infrastructure improves, it will still take some time. In fact, the uncertain state of Canada's oil industry recently prompted the Alberta government to order production cuts across the province, in a bid to deal with the supply glut. 

As we know, pipeline construction in Canada has failed to keep pace with rising domestic oil, forcing producers to sell their products at a discounted rate. While oil production is surging in Canada, the country's exploration and production companies remain out of favor, primarily due to the scarcity of pipelines. The infrastructural bottlenecks have resulted in a supply glut situation. This has forced producers to give away their products in the United States - Canada's major market - at a discounted rate. The price gap between Alberta's Western Canada Select and the New York-traded West Texas Intermediate is currently around $20 a barrel. However, with quite a few pipelines coming online next year along with the government's plans to curb output, things may gradually work better for the Canadian oil industry. ...

https://www.nasdaq.com/article/canadian-natural-cnq-slashes-capex-amid-pipeline-pinch-cm1066131

[etienne]

On the ASPO France web site, I found an interesting report from Jean Laherrère about oil production and prediction. It's quite up to date, which is unusual.

https://aspofrance.org/2018/10/03/updated-extrapolation-of-oil-past-production-to-forecast-future-production/

[Sigmetnow]

Quoting 'The Lorax,' Court Pulls Permit For Pipeline Crossing Appalachian Trail

A federal appeals court has thrown out a power company's permit to build a natural gas pipeline across two national forests and the Appalachian Trail – and slammed the U.S. Forest Service for granting the approvals in the first place.

In a decision filed Thursday by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., a three-judge panel declared the U.S. Forest Service "abdicated its responsibility to preserve national forest resources" when it issued permits for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline to build through parts of the George Washington and Monongahela National Forests and a right of way across the Appalachian Trail.

"This conclusion," they wrote in a unanimous judgment, "is particularly informed by the Forest Service's serious environmental concerns that were suddenly, and mysteriously, assuaged in time to meet a private pipeline company's deadlines."

The judges cited Dr. Seuss' The Lorax: "We trust the United States Forest Service to 'speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues.'" ...

https://www.npr.org/2018/12/14/676950106/quoting-the-lorax-court-pulls-permit-for-pipeline-crossing-appalachian-trail

[Shared Humanity]

Back up to $54 all ready.  My, my.

Watching the price of WTI is a lot like watching the thermometer hanging outside the kitchen window. Only useful if you are planning to do something right now and a very poor predictor of next week.

[gerontocrat]

A bit of hopeful news for a change.
 
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/16/divestment-fossil-fuel-industry-trillions-dollars-investments-carbon

At last, divestment is hitting the fossil fuel industry where it hurts
Bill McKibben

Trillions of dollars of investments are being taken out of carbon-intensive companies. Governments must now take notice

......we have marked the 1,000th divestment in what has become by far the largest anti-corporate campaign of its kind. The latest to sell their shares – major French and Australian pension funds, and Brandeis University in Massachusetts – bring the total size of portfolios and endowments in the campaign to just under $8 trillion (£6.4tn).....

.....since the fossil fuel sector has badly underperformed on the market over recent years, moving money into other investments has dramatically increased returns. Pity, for instance, the New York state comptroller Thomas DeNapoli – unlike his New York City counterpart, he refused to divest, and the cost has been about $17,000 per pensioner.......

At first we thought our biggest effect would be to rob fossil fuel companies of their social licence. Since their political lobbying power is above all what prevents governments taking serious action on global warming, that would have been worth the fight........As time went on it became clear that divestment was also squeezing the industry.......Indeed, just a few weeks ago analysts at that radical collective Goldman Sachs said the “divestment movement has been a key driver of the coal sector’s 60% de-rating over the past five years”.

Now the contagion seems to be spreading to the oil and gas sector, where Shell announced earlier this year that divestment should be considered a “material risk” to its business. That’s how oil companies across the world are treating it – in the US, petroleum producers have set up a website designed to discredit divestment...

[Tor Bejnar]

And back down.

[gerontocrat]

Back up to $54 all ready.  My, my.

Watching the price of WTI is a lot like watching the thermometer hanging outside the kitchen window. Only useful if you are planning to do something right now and a very poor predictor of next week.

I agree - totally.

As of today crude is a necessity - as is bread. Demand for the black stuff is therefore inelastic. The only way it is going to shift is if that demand curve shifts sideways. The only way that this is likely to happen is when renewable energy increases to the extent that it is greater than the growth in demand for energy (as in the graph attached). Demand does not fall during normal economic recessions, though a global crash might do it. (The 2008-10 financial crash did not to any significant extent)

The BP energy outlook published June 2018 sees this as unlikely to happen for oil until sometime in the 2030's and for gas not at all. Note that this BP document is regarded as a bible by the fossil fuel industry.

[Sebastian Jones]

Meanwhile in the Australian State of W.A., is is full steam ahead with fracking. A moratorium, intended to be in place until the State could demonstrate fracking's benefits outweighed the climate and other pollution harms has been lifted upon the advice of the most blatantly biased report I can remember.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/18/western-australia-is-being-opened-to-fracking-on-misleading-and-ill-founded-grounds?CMP=twt_a-environment_b-gdneco

[Tor Bejnar]

When was West Texas Intermediate this low?  Ah, last year.
(images from Bloomberg.com)

[ArcticMelt1]

Forecast world emission CO2 untill 2040 year from 2016 year.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=26252



In general business as usual.

[ArcticMelt1]

More recent forecast from last year.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=33772

[sidd]

Poland to import LNG from the USA:

https://www.lngworldnews.com/sempra-in-20-year-lng-supply-deal-with-polands-pgnig/

Other suppliers have signed up already:

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2018/12/19/u-s-secures-20-year-deal-to-supply-natural-gas-to-poland/

sidd

[Sciguy]

The EIA has been notorious for underestimating the growth of renewable energy, the reductions in the cost of renewable energy and for overestimating the growth of fossil fuels.  Here's a link to one article summarizing their errors:

https://www.energyandpolicy.org/eia-forecasts-are-frequently-wrong/

Given that both new wind and new solar power plants are currently cheaper than continuing to operate existing coal plants, there is no way that coal will maintain the market share it currently has until 2040.  In the US alone, about 20% of existing plants are expected to be retired in the next five years.

And a lot of natural gas is currently being produced by fracking.  Fracked wells deplete quickly and producers have to continuously drill and frack new wells to maintain production levels.  In the face of rapidly declining prices for new solar and wind plants, plus the rapid development of battery technology, natural gas production will be on the decline by the 2020s. 

Oil production will decline when the transportation sector switches to electric vehicles.  We're still in the early stages of the transition and vehicles will be on the road (and in the air and on the seas) for decades after new electric vehicles become the dominant form of transportation.  Solid-state batteries are still in the experimental stage; they're expected to be commercialized in the 2020s.  When that happens, EVs will outsell ICEs  So, we'll probably see peak oil demand in the 2020s as well.

[gerontocrat]

Back up to $54 all ready.  My, my.

Watching the price of WTI is a lot like watching the thermometer hanging outside the kitchen window. Only useful if you are planning to do something right now and a very poor predictor of next week.

Very true. But when there is a longer-term substantial trend definitely time to have a think. E.g.
- how much is the recent falls in WTI price about supply growth in the USA and elsewhere?
- how much is it about worries in global and USA demand?
- and how much are the worries about demand a reflection of worries about the USA and global economies?

[etienne]

Well, long term is more like this below.
It never really goes down, but also doesn't get really high.

[etienne]

I believe that these upper and lower limits are signs of the importance of bitumen and light tight oil (LTO) in oil supply. Bitumen production can easily be  modulated depending of the price of oil, and LTO doesn’t last long and requires always new drilling which doesn’t happen when prices are low. So we would be now in a situation where production depends of demand. Of course, there is a lot of inertia, which explains prices fluctuation.

[oren]

As demand is rather stable and slowly growing over timr, oil price swings have almost everything to do with supply and future expectations of supply. What will OPEC do? Will there be a war? What will frackers do? Iran sanctions? Venezuela belly-up? Huge oil discovery somewhere? Oil sands pipeline? Etc.
I am waiting for the day when oil prices will be set mostly by falling demand thanks to electric tranportation. Unfortunately, that day seems to be decades into the future.

[gerontocrat]

As demand is rather stable and slowly growing over timr, oil price swings have almost everything to do with supply and future expectations of supply. What will OPEC do? Will there be a war? What will frackers do? Iran sanctions? Venezuela belly-up? Huge oil discovery somewhere? Oil sands pipeline? Etc.
I am waiting for the day when oil prices will be set mostly by falling demand thanks to electric tranportation. Unfortunately, that day seems to be decades into the future.

Interesting puzzle.
The impact of EVs on demand for oil is hugely dependent on the percentage of electricity generated from renewables.

There are two big factors:
- when distribution losses are taken into account, electricity generated from fossil fuels is about 35 to 40% efficient. Only distribution losses have to be taken into  account for electricity generated from renewables, so 90% efficiency is achievable.
- an ICEV only sends about 20% of the energy from the gasoline to the wheels. An EV sends about 60%.

The saving in fossil fuel demand (oil, gas + coal) from EVs is therefore multiplied as the percentage of renewable energy increases.The rough calculations attached are from data sources on USA autos and energy production. I have used a target of needing a cut of fossil fuel demand by 1 million b.pd.  to make a meaningful shift in oil prices.

There are 200(?) million ICEVs on the USAs roads. At the current use of renewables in USA energy generation of 40% (includes nuclear) nearly 80 million EVs need to be on the road to cut fossil fuel demand by 1 million b.p.d equivalent. If renewable energy production rose to 90% then nearly 30 million EVs are required.  Of course by then a very large drop in demand for fossil fuels for electricity generation would have happened already.

So it is the combination of more EV's plus more renewable energy that will, one hopes, crush demand for oil, gas and coal. But even Musk's dreams of 1 million+ EV production per annum is but a drop in the oil-well.

[Sigmetnow]

“But even Musk's dreams of 1 million+ EV production per annum is but a drop in the oil-well.”

Tesla has grown from less than $4Billion in 2012 to more than $55B today.  In the 3Q2018 results call, Musk affirmed the company is on track for 1 million vehicles per year in 2020 (including China production).  Assume the ramp continues, doubling every year (optimistic?), and that, taken together, all other manufacturers only manage to achieve an equivalent amount (pessimistic?).  That still gets us to your 80 million EVs on the road by 2025 or -26.  That’s global production, but the U.S. is currently about 50% of Tesla’s EV market, so... maybe an additional year or two, at most, could get us there in the U.S..

Musk’s new compensation package requires that Tesla take in $175 Billion in revenue “for the previous four consecutive fiscal quarters” by the end of 10 years.* (Related or not, Elon’s estimate for a $25k Tesla has gone from ‘never,’ to ‘5 years,’ to most recently: ‘3 years.’) 

Between more EVs and fewer ICEVs on the road (for all the reasons so often discussed in this thread), oil demand will decrease drastically by the mid-2020’s.

In 2012, Tesla’s Board approved a performance stock option award for Mr. Musk that required Tesla to grow its market capitalization in $4 billion increments from what was then less than a $4 billion company to a company that is now worth more than $55 billion, and to concurrently execute 10 key operational goals. Although these milestones were viewed at the time as very difficult to achieve, by last year, all of the market capitalization milestones had been achieved, and all but one of the operational milestones have now been achieved as well.*

*Source: Tesla Proxy statement for the March 2018 stockholder meeting.

[Alexander555]

Doubling every year. That EV factory we have over here already got a price hike of 10 % for the batteries. Because of the limited supply of recourses to build them. So if today's rate of production is already a problem, than doubling every year is maybe a little too optimistic.

[Bruce Steele]

WTI broke bellow $45 today so Buddy gets to collect on his bet that oil would drop bellow $45 before it rose above $90.

[Tor Bejnar]

Good of you to remember Buddy's bet.  For the graphically inclined (from Bloomberg):

[Sigmetnow]

U.S. shale producers hit the brakes on 2019 spending

U.S. shale producers are slamming the brakes on next year’s drilling with crude prices off 40 percent and mounting fears of oversupply, paring budgets that in some cases were set only weeks earlier.

The reversal is alarming because blistering growth in shale fields has propelled U.S. crude output 16 percent to about 10.9 million barrels per day for 2018, above Saudi Arabia and Russia. Production has been expected to rise 11 percent more in 2019 as large oil firms and independents added wells this year.

Shale producer Centennial Resource Development on Thursday joined rivals Diamondback Energy, and Parsley Energy in canceling drilling rig additions next year. Centennial, led by shale pioneer Mark Papa, withdrew its 2020 production target and canceled plans to add 2.5 drilling rigs, citing market weakness. ...

https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-oil-shale-cutbacks/rpt-update-1-u-s-shale-producers-hit-the-brakes-on-2019-spending-idUSL1N1YQ1W6