4/05/2012

How abundance of natural gas will limit oil price rise

The glut of natural gas in the U.S. has led to spot prices in the range of $2.5 per thousand cubic feet, or equivalently, about $90 per thousand cubic meters (about the same as domestic Gazprom price, and way below $400 per th.c.m. that Gazprom charges abroad).  With oil prices at about $100 per barrel, many enthusiasts (including T. Boone Pickens) are advocating a switch to natural gas in the transportation industry.  It is not going smoothly, and the main reason -- transportation requires fueling infrastructure - and it costs trillions to build new infrastructure in full.  The existing oil (gas) infrastracture is also worth trillions and no one wants to depreciate it to zero.  So, even though switching to nat gas makes sense in principle - it is a tough way forward.

But there's a different way (albeit less elegant).  One can convert natural gas to liquid fuel.  Roughly 11,000 cubic feet of gas give you 1 barrel of oil product.  You can do the math: $30 of nat gas can provide a nice $100 barrel of oil product.  Today Royal Dutch Shell reported that it will build a $10 billion facility in the U.S.  If it is similar to Pearl facility in Qatar with the output about 150k barrels per day (50m barrels per year), this should produce $5 billion in revenue per year.   It is immensely expensive (some report Qatar facility was $24 billion), risky (capex overruns) - but it does point to a way to bridge the gap between cheap natural gas and expensive oil.

P.S. Economist published a nice article on natural gas glut on their blog.