Driven in large part by the rapid expansion of shale oil and gas drilling and production in North America, the world market for oil field specialty chemicals at the service company level reached $25 billion in 2014, up from nearly $16 billion in 2010, but significant declines in oil price have dampened the demand outlook for oil field chemicals for the 2015 to 2019 period, according to a new global market study from IHS, a leading global source of information and analysis.
The IHS Chemical 2015 Specialty Chemicals Update Report--Oil Field Chemicals covers historical developments and future projections for supply, demand, capacity, and trade in the global oil field chemicals markets for 2015 to 2019, and projects sales of oil field chemicals will grow annually at a rate of approximately 4% to more than $30 billion in 2019, based on volume growth and price changes in effect at the end of 2014.
“During the past five years, we saw unprecedented market growth for oil field chemicals, which has been driven by the rapid development and production of shale oil and gas resources in North America,” said Stefan Schlag, director of inorganic chemicals and mineral and mining products at IHS Chemical and lead author of the report. “We expect demand for these chemicals to continue to grow, but at a much slower rate than in the previous period.”
Oil field chemicals typically fall under three categories: drilling fluids, cementing and stimulation, and oil production. Drilling muds and fluids are chemical systems used to lubricate the drill bit, to control formation pressure, and to remove formation cuttings. They can be oil- or water-based depending on the geologic formation. Cementing uses chemicals to cement steel pipes or casing to the sides of the borehole.
Stimulation chemicals encourage the flow of crude oil to the well. Two commonly used stimulation techniques are acidizing and fracturing--an essential part of hydraulic fracturing. And finally, oil production chemicals are used at all stages from oil production at the wellbore to delivery of crude to the refinery. Products include corrosion and scale inhibitors, biocides, and demulsifiers.
“IHS doesn’t expect lower oil prices to have a major impact on sales of chemicals to the production segment, but we expect lower prices will likely have more of an impact on sales of chemicals for drilling, stimulation and completion activities,” Schlag said. “The primary reason for this is that actual oil production volumes are expected to continue to increase—in line with expected continued growth of world crude oil demand. However, lower crude oil prices have slowed exploration drilling and the drilling of new boreholes, especially for more complex unconventional and deepwater oil projects. These projects typically have higher production costs, and are in many cases, not economic at current oil prices.”
Despite the year-end slowdown in E&P activity driven by the oil price slide, hydraulic fracturing continued globally in 2014, but primarily in North America. In 2014, total chemical consumption related to fracking was valued at nearly $8.6 billion, with the United States and Canada accounting for the lion’s share of demand at $8 billion, or approximately 94% of total world consumption of stimulant chemicals.
Latin America was a distant second in terms of demand for oil field chemicals, accounting for slightly less than 9% of global demand or $2.2 billion of sales. The Middle East followed with 8% of global oil field chemical demand or $2 billion in sales. The CIS followed, with 6.5% of global demand for these chemicals or $1.6 billion in sales.
“It may seem counterintuitive, but markets for oil production chemicals show almost no correlation with regional, raw oil production volumes,” Schlag said. “In fact, rather than production volumes, it is the complexity of the oil production process itself (conventional, deep water or unconventional) that has a large impact on the demand for oil field chemicals.”