The growing fear of a jump of oil to more than $ 150 US

Bloomberg

Oil investors may be sorry to have pushed companies to distribute money rather than investing in growth because the scarcity of exploration creates the part of an unprecedented increase in the price of oil. Gross, according to Sanford C. Bernstein & Co.

Companies have had to focus on increasing yields and shareholder compensation at the expense of spending on capital goods to find new supplies, wrote badysts Friday. among whom was Neil Beveridge. This caused a drop in the reserves of major producers and a drop in the sector's reinvestment coefficient to the lowest level in a generation, which paves the way for a rise in oil prices over the past decade, according to Bernstein.

"Investors who have pushed management teams to control equipment spending and return cash will miss under-investment in the sector," badysts said. "Any shortage of supply will result in a sharp rise in prices, probably well above the increase of US $ 150 per barrel in 2008."

Major global oil companies such as Royal Dutch Shell Plc and BP Plc resisted the 2014 price decline by cutting costs, selling badets and taking on debt to satisfy investors with high dividends. This year, shareholders punished the biggest of them, Exxon Mobil Corp., by combining disappointing results with a large spending plan and the lack of redemptions.

The global glut of oil in recent years has hidden a "chronic underinvestment" Bernstein said in the report. Oil rebounded at the highest level in more than three years, as the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and its allies began cutting production early last year to reduce a global oversupply. Producers now plan to extract more to help cool the market, but disturbances in Libya and Venezuela are keeping prices high.

Proven reserves of the world's major oil companies have fallen by more than 30 percent on average since 2000, while only Exxon and BP show improvement through acquisitions, Bernstein said. On the other hand, more than 1,000 million people will be urbanized in Asia over the next twenty years and this will boost the demand for cars, as well as air, road and plastic transport, which also require oil. According to Bernstein,

"If demand for oil continues to increase until 2030 and later, the strategy of returning money to shareholders and investing insufficiently in the reserves will only sow the next super-cycle. " badysts "We will have to keep the companies that have barrels on the ground to produce, or the services to extract them, and abandon the others."

Brent crude oil reached a historical high of more than US $ 147 in 2008 as incipient growth in demand and lack of available resources immediately resulted in a synchronized increase in all commodities received the super-cycle name. The global reference variety was trading this Friday at 77.31 US dollars a barrel at 9:06 in London, an increase of about 60% over the last 12 months.