This post is a summary of a conference call for bloggers hosted by the American Petroleum Institute (API) on Friday, May 15th, 2009, from 12 to 1 pm. The conference call was set up as a Q & A session where questions from numerous bloggers were fielded by Robert Ryan, the Vice President of Global Exploration at Chevron. Other participants that fielded some questions were Justin Higgs, News Media Advisor (Chevron), Mark Kibbe, Federal Relations Director (API), and John Felmy, Chief Economist (API). The following is an abridged version of the transcript, focusing on some of the more interesting questions and answers. A complete transcript of the conference call and recording of the call can be found here.

Noon EDT on http://www.kzyx.org. Have a listen!

Hurricane Gustav has brushed by the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port (LOOP), where 1.2 million barrels of oil per day is offloaded from supertankers. Here is the recent trajectory of Gustav superimposed on a map of the LOOP area, including Port Fourchon, also of critical importance to the production of oil from the Gulf of Mexico.

This is a guest post by Roger Conner Jr., known on TOD as ThatsItimout.

(Throughout, all headlines in all caps are mine, to help structure the content of the remarks, extracted from the following speeches. Links are provided so that the original remarks and slides can be viewed in entirety by the reader)

Presentation by Dr. Nimat B. Abu Al-Soof, Upstream Oil Industry Analyst, Secretariat, to the OPEC-organized session "The Petroleum Industry: New Realities Ahead?", at the Offshore Technology Conference 2007, Houston, Texas, 30 April - 3 May.

http://www.opec.org/opecna/Speeches/2007/OPECSpareCapacity.htm

If we look at the future, however, the issue of security of demand, which is intrinsically linked to the issue of security of supply, is of very real concern. Without confidence that there will be demand for OPEC oil, the incentive to undertake investment will also be reduced because of concerns that this will lead to large levels of unused capacity and, in turn, to downward pressures on oil prices.

This would result in huge revenue losses and OPEC Member Countries, as developing countries with strong competing needs for financial resources, would be adversely affected in terms of available resources for education, healthcare and infrastructure.