Marin Katusa
vs. Porter Stansberry
At the latest Casey Research conference, respected
investment analyst Porter Stansberry stood at the podium
and predicted that the price of oil will fall below US$40 per barrel within
the next 12 months. Part of his reasoning revolves around the impact that the
shale gas revolution has had in the United States – he believes a
similar thing will happen with oil.
Porter is a friend of mine and a very smart, successful
individual… but I think not.
From my perspective, the pressures at play in the oil
market are all pushing prices in the opposite direction: up. Global supplies
are tightening, costs are rising, and demand is not falling. Prices are going
to remain high, and then go higher. And there will not be a shale oil
revolution anytime soon.
I'm the kind of guy who puts his money where his mouth
is, so I challenge Porter to a bet. I bet Mr. Stansberry
that the price of oil will stay above $40 a barrel over the next 12 months.
The wager? 100 ounces of silver.
Porter has made a lot of good calls in his career. I
highly recommend watching his video The End of
America, an interesting and entertaining look at his prediction that
the US will soon drown in its debts and cease to be a global economic
powerhouse, a transition that will lead to riots across the country.
Porter and I agree on a lot of things, but on this one
he's wrong. Below are my top ten reasons that high oil prices are here to
stay.
(Editor's Note: Porter Stansberry
was one of 31 financial experts who provided valuable investor insights at
the just-concluded Casey Research Recovery Reality Check Summit. He
gave a surprisingly optimistic presentation on his vision for America that
caught everyone off guard. You can hear it and all the other Summit
presentations in their entirety with the Recovery Reality Check Audio Collection.)
Reason 1: "The Big Pinch"
Oil production levels, as well as exports, have been
falling in most of the world's top ten supplier nations:
Top Global Oil Suppliers: Four-Year
Production and Export Changes (thousand barrels
per day)
|
|
|
Country
|
Production
|
Exports
|
|
|
2006
|
2009
|
Change
|
2006
|
2009
|
Change
|
|
Saudi Arabia
|
9,152
|
8,250
|
-9.9%
|
7,036
|
6,274
|
-10.8%
|
|
Russia
|
9,247
|
9,495
|
2.7%
|
5,106
|
5,430
|
6.3%
|
|
Iran
|
4,028
|
4,037
|
0.2%
|
2,540
|
2,295
|
-9.6%
|
|
Nigeria
|
2,440
|
2,208
|
-9.5%
|
2,190
|
2,051
|
-6.4%
|
|
UAE
|
2,636
|
2,413
|
-8.5%
|
2,324
|
2,036
|
-12.4%
|
|
Iraq
|
1,996
|
2,391
|
19.8%
|
1,480
|
1,878
|
26.9%
|
|
Norway
|
2,491
|
2,067
|
-17.0%
|
2,176
|
1,759
|
-19.2%
|
|
Angola
|
1,413
|
1,907
|
34.9%
|
1,393
|
1,757
|
26.2%
|
|
Venezuela
|
2,511
|
2,239
|
-10.8%
|
2,349
|
1,691
|
-28.0%
|
|
Kuwait
|
2,535
|
2,350
|
-7.3%
|
1,760
|
1,365
|
-22.4%
|
|
The "Seven Sisters of Declining Exports"
– Saudi Arabia, Iran, Nigeria, the UAE, Norway, Venezuela, and Kuwait
– share one common characteristic: their oil fields are old. Oil fields
don't produce the same amount year after year. They decline significantly
from one year to the next because each barrel of oil taken from a reservoir
reduces the pressure within the field, leaving less force available to push
the next barrel of oil up the well. But don't take our word for it. The
following chart shows production from Alaska's North Slope oil field in the
past 30 years:
Another example? The Cantarell
field in Mexico, which produced 2.1 million barrels per day in 2003, produced
just 400,000 barrels last month, a staggering decline of more than 80% in
just nine years.
To maintain output levels, producers need to
consistently invest huge amounts of money and time in exploration,
development of new areas, and engineering and utilizing new technologies to
extend oil field lifespans. All of this costs money, and lots of it. Of the
Seven Sisters of Declining Exports, six are countries where the oil machine
is run by a national oil firm. That means that revenues from oil exports
belong to the government… and those governments are stuck between a
rock and a hard place.
They know they need to direct the oil revenues back
into their fields very soon, before they decline beyond the point of repair.
In the meantime, production levels continue to fall. Compounding the problem
of declining production is the fact that most of these countries have long
relied on cheap domestic fuel prices to keep their citizens happy. This has
spurred rising consumption in many oil-producing countries, including Saudi
Arabia, Iran, Nigeria, United Arab Emirates, Venezuela, and Kuwait.
With domestic consumption climbing and production
falling, these countries have less oil available for export every year. But
here's the hard place: oil export monies make up the vast majority of each
government's revenue. They need to sell oil on the international
market in order to fund their day-to-day operating expenses. And their
operating expenses are sky high: these governments constantly make new
social-spending promises to appease their masses; and since their populations
continue to grow, these commitments grow larger with each passing day.
Venezuela is a prime example. Hugo Chávez owes a
big chunk of his popularity to the domestic fuel subsidies that render fuel
prices in Venezuela among the lowest in the world – it costs just
US$0.18 per gallon to fill up in Venezuela, and that's ridiculously expensive
compared to the US$0.05 per gallon it cost a year ago. Yes, that means you
could have filled your car for $1 in Caracas.
Getting rid of these fuel subsidies would solve part of
the problem, but it is simply not doable – it is not just political
suicide, but a sure-fire way to incite riots and social unrest. Just a few
months ago Nigeria's government tried increasing domestic gas prices; the
country rapidly descended into violence as protestors demanded a return to
subsidized fuel. The government relented within days.
Fuel subsidies are not the only expensive item on many
a government's social-spending list. Housing, food, health care, education
– these are all burdens that socialist-tending governments take on to
cement support. Social spending is a great way to make yourself popular with
your citizens, but it is also a great way to bankrupt your country…
unless, of course, you can sell oil at high prices to other countries.
According to our analysis, OPEC nations need the price of oil to stay above
$60 per barrel to pay for all their social programs. In other words, they
need $60+ oil to stay in power – and you can be certain they will do
everything necessary to make sure this happens.
To sum it up: Governments in most of the world's key
oil export nations need more money from fewer barrels of oil, and it is a lot
easier to hose your international customers than your own citizens. This
results in "The Big Pinch."
What is "The Big Pinch?" In simple terms:
Declining production
+ increased domestic demand = Less oil available for export
But…
Revenues from
oil exports must at least remain stable, if not increase, to meet domestic
budget needs
Therefore…
Oil export
prices must increase.
Reason 2: Natural Gas and Oil – Different
Markets, Different Outlooks
Natural gas and oil are both hydrocarbons, and analysts
frequently discuss the two as if they are one and the same, but they are very
different commodities with completely separate market mechanics. To
summarize: oil is a global commodity while natural gas is a regional
commodity.
Natural gas can only travel via two methods: through
pipelines and as liquefied natural gas (LNG). Engineers have come a long way in
building pipelines that traverse thousands of miles or run underneath bodies
of water, but pipelines are still limited in their usefulness – we're
never going to build a pipeline from Norway to Japan, for example. The only
way to transport natural gas across oceans is as LNG.
In its gaseous form, natural gas takes up far too much
room to ship economically, so LNG is natural gas that has been condensed to
liquid state. On conversion into a liquid the volume shrinks to just 1/600 of
its original size, making it economic for transportation. Unfortunately these
liquefaction plants easily take several years and billions of dollars to
build. Also, not all gas-hungry countries can take LNG – they must have
a regasification facility that accepts the LNG, turns it back into a gas, and
sends it through pipelines to consumers.
Many energy-hungry countries, such as Japan, Korea, and
Taiwan, have built the necessary infrastructure and are taking all the LNG
they can get their hands on. Their competition for LNG cargoes has driven LNG
prices far above basic natural gas prices. A quick comparison: Japanese
natural gas trades at $16.8 per MMBTU, whereas Henry Hub trades at just
$2.11.
What does this mean? Countries with
natural-gas-liquefaction facilities are able to get top dollar for their gas
in the global market, while countries without LNG capabilities are at the
mercy of regional supply and demand.
What about the United States? The United States has no
LNG liquefaction plants – the last operating facility, the Kenai plant
in Alaska, closed in 2011. This means that the flood of shale gas production
in the US will continue to overflow storage facilities and depress US natural
gas prices, because domestic demand is not rising as fast as production and
there is no other way to get the gas to customers across the oceans who want
it.
Oil, however, is a very different story. A barrel of
oil produced in Saudi Arabia can be shipped to the United States and sold on
that market. This means that if oil cost $10 in Saudi Arabia and $50 in
United States, some enterprising business would take oil from Saudi Arabia,
ship it to the United States, and sell it for a profit. Of course, the real
picture is a bit more complicated than that. Prices do differ somewhat from
place to place – Western Canada Select crude, for example, currently
sells for $88.98 per barrel, while Brent Crude is priced at $119.17 per
barrel – but such divergences simply reflect the costs and constraints
of transportation and the range of crude-oil qualities. The general idea is
that oil is a global product. As such, dramatic increases in supply in one
part of the world can be sold off elsewhere in the global market, creating
much less impact on the producing region than with regionally constrained
natural gas.
This means that while a rapid increase in natural gas
production pummelled gas prices in North America,
the same would not happen to oil prices in North America or elsewhere if US
oil production suddenly jumped.
An example might help put things in perspective. US natural
gas production grew by 30% in the past five years due to the shale gas
revolution. If US crude oil production grew by 30% overnight, that
would add three million barrels a day to global production. Even though this
sounds like a lot of oil, it would represent just 4% of the global supply.
World crude oil production rose 4% from 2003 to 2004.
What happened to the price of oil?
It increased by 34%.
Reason 3: Natural Gas is Not Oil
One of the main arguments Porter uses to support a
falling price of oil is that the world's newfound abundance of natural gas is
providing an alternative fuel for the future. While there is some truth to
that statement, there are more caveats than certainties.
There is no way natural gas will replace even a
fragment of oil demand during the time frame in question, which is the next
12 months. Oil is entrenched as the world's mainstay fuel; gas has always
been second or third on the list of energy-resource importance. Changing the
ordering on that list will take decades, if not generations. How many natural
gas fueling stations do you drive past on your way to work? Not many, I'd
bet, especially compared to the number of gas stations in your neighborhood.
Do you see that ratio changing much in just 12 months?
In addition, it's easy to forget that we rely on oil
for far more than just fuel. Look around you – chances are good that at
least half of the items you see from wherever you're sitting include at least
some oil. We use oil for concrete, shingles, pipes, ink, synthetic fabrics,
crayons, computer cases, carpet, paint, Styrofoam, shampoo, helmets,
electrical insulation, toothpaste, lipstick, tires, rope, fertilizer,
candles, adhesives, refrigerants, artificial turf, pill capsules, soft
contact lenses, shaving cream, antifreeze, antihistamines, insecticides, fan
belts, hand lotions, caulking, golf balls, credit cards, Formica, footballs,
bandages, medical tubing, packing tape, and many, many more items.
Oil is a deeply ingrained part of how our world
operates, and demand will continue to rise with population for many decades
to come. It will take many years for natural gas to even start to supplant
oil as the dominant fuel.
Natural gas will play a growing role in the world's
energy scene, but the timeframe for the shift is very long. Twelve months
from now natural gas prices in North America will still be depressed and
global oil demand will be almost the same as it is today.
Reason 4: My Country, My Oil
I believe we are in the early stages of the
"Decade of Resource Nationalization." As supplies tighten, natural
resources of all kinds will become more and more valuable. Whether to control
additional revenues or to secure domestic supplies, governments will
nationalize natural resources with gusto.
The latest example of this is Argentina. A beautiful country with incredible geological potential,
Argentina's resources are wasted on a government that is simply unable
to incentivize private investment in the country. Now the government is going
to try to develop its technologically challenging oil fields alone, and mark
my words it will fail.
On April 16, 2012, Argentine President Cristina
Kirchner said her government would seek approval from Congress to take a 51%
government stake in the YPF, the largest oil producer in the country. Until
that announcement, YPF was majority-controlled by Spanish firm Repsol, which just months ago announced the discovery of
almost a billion barrels of recoverable resources in the Vaca
Muerta ("Dead Cow") formation in Argentina's
Neuquen province. The nationalization of YPF is
very unfortunate for Repsol, which has seen its
share price decline dramatically since the announcement, but it is just as
unfortunate for all the Argentineans who will not see any oil revenues now that
Kirchner has turned the "Dead Cow" into "dead shale."
YPF may be the first casualty in Kirchner's oil and gas
nationalization spree but it will not be the last, as there is widespread
enthusiasm within Argentina for further expropriation and nationalization
within the sector. Today's enthusiasm will become tomorrow's disappointment
as Argentineans taste the bitter reality that government resource
nationalization almost always ends badly.
Kirchner is nationalizing Argentina's oil sector
directly, but lots of resource nationalization is done in much more
roundabout ways. These devious methods include: increasing the tax levied on
oil production (United Kingdom); introducing a windfall tax (Ecuador); or
suddenly adding capital-gains tax to sales of oil projects (Uganda). In all
these cases, the governments wound up with more money while the oil companies
and their investors got stuck with the bill. "Big bad oil
companies" are frequently made the bogeyman, but in reality profit
margins for oil production keep getting slimmer and slimmer – and the
real bogeyman is often a greedy government.
Whether a government is direct or covert about its
desire to nationalize its resources, the results are the same for global
resource explorer-developers: increased risk. It doesn't take long before the
risk-reward balance becomes skewed toward risk and companies begin to pack up
and leave.
Guess where that leads? To lower production volumes and
higher prices.
Reason 5: "Shale Revolution" – A Purely
North-American Phenomenon
Porter argues that a global shale oil revolution could
push production volumes way up and prices way down, but this argument assumes
the world has the infrastructure to power such a revolution. That is simply
wrong.
It is not easy to drill an economic
shale well, whether for oil or gas. To get the most out of a shale formation,
an operator often needs to use a high-power – over 25,000 horsepower
– frac drill set. He has to drill
horizontally, which is far more technical and challenging than drilling
vertically, and then has to complete multiple fracs
to get the well flowing.
North America has more energy infrastructure than
anywhere else in the world, resulting from years of conventional oil and gas
development and production. In North America it is relatively easy to find
drilling companies armed with these high-power frac
sets, but such is definitely not the case in most other parts of the world.
Europe, for example, is home to fewer than one-tenth
the number of drilling and fracking sets as there
are in North America. That means any shale revolution in Europe would take a
very long time to develop –the equipment and expertise just aren't
there.
Yes, shale gas production ramped up quickly in North
America, but we had the infrastructure in place and just needed to adapt it
to a new kind of geology. The head start means North America is now more than
a decade ahead in a sector that Europe has just begun to understand, and one
that Russia still refuses to believe.
It is safe to say that it will take a very long time
for the shale revolution to have a major impact in Europe and elsewhere. In
the best-case scenario, we believe Europe will only have a small amount of
shale production of any type twelve months from now.
Reason 6: The Easy Oil Is Gone and Shale Oil Wells
Decline in a Big Way
The IEA estimates it costs between $4 and $6 to produce
each barrel of oil from the conventional fields in Saudi Arabia and Iraq,
including capital expenditures. Algerian, Iranian, Libyan, and Qatari fields
cost slightly more, at about $10 to $15 per barrel. These countries produce
most of their oil from relatively easy, straightforward, conventional
deposits.
My perspective on energy resources revolves around the
fact that there are no more of these big, easy deposits to be found. The
deposits of tomorrow are harder to find and more complicated, expensive, and
risky to develop. Companies now have to manage the litany of challenges
inherent in getting oil out of places like the oil sands, sub-salt deposits,
and ultra-deep offshore reservoirs.
With increased difficulty comes
higher production costs. This also means that if oil prices fall too
low, costs will overwhelm revenues and production will shut down altogether.
The Canadian oil sands are a perfect example. Producing
projects in the oil sands need an oil price of at least $60 per barrel to
remain economic – and that assumes capital costs have already been
repaid. To build a new oil sands project, a producer needs to believe
prices will remain high enough to cover not only his basic production costs
but also to repay his huge capital outlay. As such, new oil sands projects
are uneconomic to develop without an oil price of at least $85 per barrel.
The oil sands are by no means the only important oil
region with high production costs. To access most of the world's
unconventional oil resources, companies need to drill horizontally,
which costs much more than drilling vertically. After drilling horizontally,
producers have to frac the well in many stages to
achieve commercial production. This means each well costs many million
dollars, an expenditure that is not going to be economic at $40 oil.
What is more, these wells decline much more rapidly
than conventional wells. Production from any well falls with each passing
year, but with unconventional wells the decline can be dramatic. In fact,
shale wells typically decline by more than 50% after their very first year.
To maintain production, companies need to be constantly drilling and
commissioning wells, a treadmill process that increases the production costs
significantly.
In the world of unconventional production, companies
are faced with a double whammy: they need to drill more wells than a
conventional field would require; and each well is much more expensive.
Companies are not going to bother with this challenge if low prices make it a
money-losing endeavor. Once production begins to shut down, the world will
panic and the price of oil will turn upward once again.
Reason 7: The World Is Always Hungry for Oil –
and Oil Deposits
The world is not awash in oil. On the contrary –
we produce only just enough oil to meet global demand. With the world's
population growing every day demand continues to rise, making the balance
ever tighter. Even the threat of major production cuts of the sort we just
discussed – which would surface the moment the oil price fell to $85
per barrel – would be enough to send tremors through the global oil
machine and push the price of oil back up.
It is not only traders who will react to push prices
back up. Countries will jump at the chance to secure oil supplies on the
cheap. You see, for the oil-needy nations of the world, having to constantly
walk this supply-demand tightrope is far from ideal. Far preferable would be
to control of enough oil deposits, at home and around the world, to meet
national needs. With nation after nation coming to this realization, the race
is on to secure energy supplies.
China is the biggest player in this arena. Armed with a
massive bank account, the Chinese are seizing every chance they get to buy
major deposits. If the price of oil starts to slide, as Porter suggests it
will, the value of major oil projects will decline as well and the Chinese
will act, buying up any reduced-price oil deposit they can find. Acquisition
activity like that will push prices back up again, if for no reason other
than that people will remember the finite and declining nature of our world's
oil reserves.
I also think the starting gun has already gone off in
the global race for uranium, but that's a story for another day.
Reason 8: A Falling Oil Price Means Big Chunks of
Global Reserves Uneconomic
If exploration drills find an oil deposit, data from
those drills are used to calculate a "resource estimate," which is
a geologic best-guess of how much oil the formation holds. However, oil in
the ground is not necessarily oil that will ever see the light of day. That's
where the "reserve estimate" comes in. Reserves are an estimate of
the amount of oil within a deposit that can be extracted economically.
Let's look at both of those words:
"extracted" and "economically." Whether oil from a
deposit can be extracted depends on the geologic parameters of the deposit
and the technical abilities of today, which combine to determine how much of
the deposit is "technically recoverable." Then the
"economically" part of the description comes into play. Oil is only
"economically recoverable" if the cost of production is less than
the price of oil – put simply, the producer has to be able to make a profit.
Remember, my outlook on energy resources is based on
the premise that most of the easy deposits are gone. In general, only the
hard-to-find and expensive-and-complicated-to-produce deposits remain.
Producers cannot make money from these challenging deposits if oil is cheap,
which means reserves will revert to being uneconomic resources.
Examples abound. It costs far more to produce a barrel
of oil from the deepwater Gulf of Mexico, Canada's
oil sands, Russia's Arctic waters, Estonia's oil shales,
or Brazil's deepwater sub-salt deposits than from
the big, conventional oil fields of yesterday, like those in Texas or Saudi
Arabia. Oil reserves in these places will evaporate if oil prices fall and
render them uneconomic to develop. The world's oil resource count will remain
the same, but resources are useless if we can't get them out of the ground.
The world uses a lot of oil. All of that oil has to
come from our finite pool of oil reserves. A falling oil price would
gradually eliminate that pool, because the cheap oil is gone. And that simply
doesn't stand up to supply-demand logic.
Reason 9: Between the Lines – By-products
One reason that North-American gas producers continue
to drill select wells is because certain shale reservoirs contain lots of
Natural Gas Liquids (NGLs). These liquids, comprised
of bigger carbon molecules than the methane that is natural gas, trade at a
significant premium to natural gas. Furthermore, these NGL-rich natural gas
wells often also produce some oil.
The presence of these bonus products means producers in
NGL-rich areas can continue to operate because revenues from the sales of
by-product NGLs and oil compensate for rock-bottom natural gas prices. The
result is upside-down – for these operators natural gas is still the
primary product by volume but is the least-important product by value –
and ironic, because by continuing to add to the natural-gas supply glut in
North America their gas output is actually perpetuating the gas pricing
problem. But the point is that the price of gas doesn't matter: as long as
the NGLs and oil continue to flow out of these wells, the operator will
remain profitable.
A similar paradigm does not exist in an oil well with
natural gas as a by-product, because of course gas is worth far less than
oil. If the price of oil began to fall dramatically, companies would simply
stop drilling and there would be no upside-down by-product incentive to
continue.
Reason 10: Black-Swan Events – The Fragile
Supply-Demand Balance
A "black-swan" event is a rare but highly significant
event with dramatic impact. The collapse of Lehman Brothers, the Arab Spring,
and the Fukushima nuclear disaster are all examples of black-swan events.
These events tend to tilt more in favor of a rising oil
price. Consider this: the loss of oil production from Libya – which
represented just a small fraction of the world's production – caused
the price of oil to move 25% in just two months.
As we have mentioned before, the world produces barely
enough to satisfy global demand at the moment. That is precisely why any
significant impact on the supply side generally shocks the market
disproportionally.
And there are a good number of possibilities that could
quite easily occur that would send the price of oil much higher: a war with
Iran; OPEC reducing production levels; terrorist attacks in Nigeria; renewed
social unrest in the Middle East… the list goes on. The point is: if
something goes wrong geopolitically in the world, it is more likely than not
that oil will begin shooting up.
And there you have it – ten reasons why the price
of oil will not hit $40 a barrel in the next 12 months.
Porter, I respect your opinions and consider you a
friend but, just like I took your money in our poker game, I look forward to
laying my hands on your 100 ounces of silver, should you accept my challenge.
Thanks for reading,
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