Bibliographic record
Abstract
Editor's column Consensus is growing around the idea that oil prices will fluctuate in the $45–60 bbl range, both in the short term and perhaps even for the long term. This has led to a rash of studies about what this means for operators and service companies in the “new normal.” On the operator side, much of that depends on what oil price translates to profitability, both in the unconventional and conventional sectors. Some anecdotal evidence is trickling in. Public companies reported second quarter earnings in late July and early August. According to earnings reports, 15 of the largest shale producers posted total net losses of $470 million. During that time (April–June), WTI oil prices averaged $48/bbl. That was a marked improvement over the past quarter and past year. Those same companies reported total losses of $3.7 billion in the first quarter of 2017 and losses of $7.4 billion in the second quarter of 2016. The financial improvement in the second quarter came from more efficient operations, cost cutting, and a rise in oil prices. But at what oil price are shale producers profitable? Analysts have thrown around figures of as low as $40/bbl, but a detailed study of the issue by consultancy Wood Mackenzie sheds new light on the subject and is examined on page 47 of this issue. The consensus is that $50/bbl brings most companies closer to profitability than $40/bbl, but perhaps needs to be over $50/bbl to be sustainable. Operators are taking the “lower for longer” outlook seriously and are adapting. Occidental Petroleum announced that it was tying a company-wide compensation plan to the firm being profitable at $40/bbl. Some of the largest majors are beginning to sanction projects once again—although cautiously. More new oil and gas fields were given the green light in the first half of this year than in all of last year, including projects by ExxonMobil, Shell, and BP. But about three-fourths of those conventional projects are expansions of existing fields or satellite developments that tie back to existing pipelines and platforms, according to Wood Mackenzie. Shell, for example, is now tying its Kaikias project in the US Gulf of Mexico to its existing Ursa production hub to limit costs. When BP reported its earnings, Bob Dudley, the company’s chief executive, said the firm was planning on the basis of oil prices being at current levels for the next 5 years. Noted oil historian Daniel Yergin agreed, adding, “The industry is in the middle of re-engineering its processes and its technologies to be a $50/bbl industry, not a $100/bbl industry.” Major oilfield services companies Halliburton, Schlumberger, and Baker Hughes reported increased revenue for the second quarter of 2017 compared with the first quarter, with revenue up 15.8% for Halliburton, 8.2% for Schlumberger, and 6.3% for Baker Hughes. Halliburton earned a slight profit while the two other companies posted net losses. Dave Lesar, chairman of Halliburton, sees a bit of a slowdown coming in shale, saying that producers were “tapping the brakes” on drilling as oil prices remain under $50/bbl and the global supply glut appears to have life left in it.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".