The Petroleum Club of Shreveport, 15th floor
Cost: $20, Children 10 and under $8
We encourage members to invite guests, spouses, and friends to any of our meetings.
If you’d like a seat, kindly use the form below to make your reservation by the preceding Friday.
Biography
Arthur E. Berman, Director
Labyrinth Consulting Services, Inc.
Sugar Land, TX 77479
Arthur E. Berman is a petroleum geologist with 40 years of oil and gas industry experience. He is an expert on U.S. shale plays and is currently consulting for several E&P companies and capital groups in the energy sector.
During the past year, he made more than 25 keynote addresses for energy conferences, boards of directors and professional societies. Berman has published more than 100 articles on oil and gas plays and trends. He has been interviewed about oil and gas topics on CBS, CNBC, CNN, CBC, Platt’s Energy Week, BNN, Bloomberg, Platt’s, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone and The New York Times.
Berman is an associate editor of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists Bulletin, and was a managing editor and frequent contributor to theoildrum.com. He is a Director of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil, and has served on the boards of directors of The Houston Geological Society and The Society of Independent Professional Earth Scientists.
He worked 20 years for Amoco (now BP) and 20 years as consulting geologist. He has an M.S. (Geology) from the Colorado School of Mines and a B.A. (History) from Amherst College. Website: artberman.com
Abstract
Oil markets grossly misjudged price trends in the last few months.
Oil prices increased 18% from mid-August to early October based on an unfounded fear of undersupply. Prices then fell 34% based on concerns of over-supply.
In 2019, WTI has recovered 34% of value lost from October through December. Many analysts incorrectly assume that the 4th quarter 2018 sell-off was a simple if severe correction and that prices are now returning to normal.
The oil-price collapse of 2018 was a structural adjustment to global over-supply and perceived break-even prices. It is unlikely that prices will recover to sustainable pre-collapse levels in the near future.
Comparative inventory provides a framework to understand the devaluation of oil prices in both 2017 and 2018. A yield curve is derived using comparative inventory (instead of maturity in a bond yield curve) and spot oil price (instead of interest rate). This provides a semi-quantitative method of comparing current price to the price anticipated based on the present level of oil in storage.
This technique suggests that average Brent price will probably remain below $65 and WTI price, below $60 in 2019.
