North Sea Oil Production May Go Down

On top of production declines in Iran and Venezuela, ongoing OPEC cuts, Urals contamination outages in Russia and maintenance in Kazakhstan, North Sea production is also struggling, Rystad Energy said.

"Currently we see unplanned outages at Oseberg and Flotta with combined impact of 160,000 bpd. Furthermore, the North Sea is heading into maintenance season," said the energy research and business intelligence company.

"We forecast North Sea oil production to drop next month to the lowest level since August 2014 as Ekofisk goes into maintenance," it added.

"Based on our field level production and maintenance forecast, we expect North Sea oil production to drop to 2.28 million bpd with 462,000 bpd lost due to outages," the report said.

Turnaround activity at Ekofisk feeding fields is the primary driver accounting for 230,000 bpd of the total outage for June 2019. The oil market is in for a tight start to the summer indeed.