Volume 38, Issue 3 pp. 370-387
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Open Data

The shale oil revolution and the global oil supply curve

Claudia Foroni

Corresponding Author

Claudia Foroni

European Central Bank, Frankfurt, Germany

Correspondence

Claudia Foroni, European Central Bank, Frankfurt, Germany.

Email: [email protected]

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Livio Stracca

Livio Stracca

European Central Bank, Frankfurt, Germany

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First published: 18 November 2022

Summary

We focus on the implications of the shale oil boom for the global supply of oil. In order to derive testable implications, we introduce a simple stylized model with two producers, one facing low production costs and one higher production costs but potentially lower adjustment costs, competing à la Stackelberg. We find that the supply function is flatter for the high cost producer and that the supply function for shale oil producers becomes more responsive to demand shocks when adjustment costs decline. On the empirical side, we apply an instrumental variable approach using estimates of demand-driven oil price changes derived from a standard structural VAR of the oil market. A main finding is that global oil supply is rather vertical, with a short-term elasticity around 0.05. A rolling sample reveals that the shale oil boom does not appear to have fundamentally changed the contours of global oil production, but there is evidence for the oil supply curve to become more vertical in Saudi Arabia and more price responsive in the United States.

OPEN RESEARCH BADGES

Open Data

This article has been awarded Open Data Badge for making publicly available the digitally-shareable data necessary to reproduce the reported results. Data is available at http://qed.econ.queensu.ca/jae/datasets/foroni003/.

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

The JAE Data Archive directory is available at http://qed.econ.queensu.ca/jae/forthcoming/foroni-stracca/.

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