Eagle Ford Produces 1 Billionth Barrel of Oil

The Eagle Ford shale play produces its one billion barrel of cumulative oil production, and the play’s potential remains strong despite lower oil prices. The Eagle Ford shale play in South Texas achieved a significant milestone last month with the production of its one billionth barrel of crude and condensate. Over 70 percent of this […]

UN to curb population by axing laws for sex, drugs, abortions for youths

The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) realizes there are more young people on earth today than at any other time in human history, and the organization has a plan to reduce this segment of the population in order to achieve what it calls a “demographic dividend.” To reach this goal, the UNFPA is working toward […]

So Why Isn’t Gas Even Cheaper?

Economists call it the “rockets and feathers” phenomenon. Rockets zoom higher, but feathers float lower. There’s pretty wide agreement that gasoline prices seem to rise quickly when oil spikes, but they don’t fall so quickly when crude crashes. There’s little consensus about why. The latest data point comes with the recent plunge in global crude […]

Oil and the Global Slowdown

The world economy is slowing down and the authorities are fretting. Japan, Italy, and Greece are all in recession. China is slowing down according to official statistics, and even more according to whispered accounts. Germany, France and the Netherlands are all at stall speed. According to the BLS, the United States is doing just great […]

Saudi Arabia Sees Oil Prices Stabilizing Around $60 a Barrel

OPEC’s biggest oil producer, Saudi Arabia, now believes oil prices could stabilize at around $60 a barrel, a level both it and other Gulf producers believe they could withstand, according to people familiar with the situation. The shift in Saudi thinking suggests the de facto leader of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries won’t […]

Could Falling Oil Prices Spark A Financial Crisis?

The oil and gas boom in the United States was made possible by the extensive credit afforded to drillers. Not only has financing come from company shareholders and traditional banks, but hundreds of billions of dollars have also come from junk-bond investors looking for high returns. Junk-bond debt in energy has reached $210 billion, which […]

Iraq Exports Boost to Add Pressure on 2015 Oil Market

Iraq’s plan for higher oil exports in 2015, emerging in detail just days after OPEC shunned any output cut, will add to global over supply and is likely to entrench the reluctance of other OPEC members to curb their own supplies. Iraq’s government on Tuesday reached a temporary agreement with Kurdish regional authorities, preparing the […]

World Proved Oil Reserves, Fact or Fiction

The EIA publishes Annually a list of World Proved Reserves of Crude Oil. Though all charts in this post use the EIA data, BP, the IEA and virtually every other reporting agency in the world uses basically the same data. It is my contention that this data is misleading and totally meaningless. This is especially […]

Oil And The Global Slowdown

The world economy is slowing down and the authorities are fretting. Japan, Italy, and Greece are all in recession. China is slowing down according to official statistics, and even more according to whispered accounts. Germany, France and the Netherlands are all at stall speed. According to the BLS, the United States is doing just great […]

No Peak Oil: Proved U.S. Oil and Gas Reserves Continue To Increase

It was only four years ago that economist and New York Times Columnist Paul Krugman sounded the alarm on peak oil, lamenting that high oil and commodity prices reflect the fact that we live in a “finite world.” But now oil prices are plummeting as U.S. oil production booms due to hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, […]

Peak Natural gas: The fracking fallacy

The United States is banking on decades of abundant natural gas to power its economic resurgence. That may be wishful thinking. When US President Barack Obama talks about the future, he foresees a thriving US economy fuelled to a large degree by vast amounts of natural gas pouring from domestic wells. “We have a supply […]

Peak Oil in America?

Yes! During my 14-year run in the institutional research and trading business in Boston, the finest analyst with whom I worked was oil analyst Dave Hammer. Since 1990 Dave has been the managing partner of Hammer Asset Management. We stay in touch to this day. Yesterday I asked Dave about my concern that shale production […]

Shale Liquidations Begin? Sub-$50 Oil Appears In North Dakota

When ISIS dared to steal and sell oil at below market rates, they were dire pirates that needed to be destroyed (and anyone who dared to buy it was pariah). So when, as Bloomberg reports, crude sold at the wellhead in the Bakken shale region in North Dakota fell to $49.69 a barrel on Nov. […]

News Of OPEC’s Demise Has Been Much Exaggerated

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) last week made no change to its production target despite a 40 percent slide in oil prices over just five months, causing some commentators to pronounce the cartel irrelevant. If OPEC cannot act to defend the prices and revenues of its member countries, does the organisation still […]

T. Boone Pickens predicts $100 a barrel

Prominent oil investor and sometime-renewable-energy booster T. Boone Pickens predicted Tuesday that the plunging oil price would rebound to $100 a barrel in the next 12 to 18 months. Pickens also said he expects the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries will eventually move to slash oil production, possibly in the first half of 2015. […]

We Are Never Going to Run Out of Oil

In a chilling 2010 column, Paul Krugman declared: “peak oil has arrived.” So it’s really not surprising that the national average for a gallon of gas has fallen to $2.77 this week – in 10 states it was under $2.60 – and analysts predict we’re going to dip below the two-dollar mark soon. U.S. oil is down to […]

Iraqi Government and Kurds Reach Deal to Share Oil Revenues

The Iraqi government agreed Tuesday to a long-term accord with the autonomous Kurdish region to share the country’s oil wealth and military resources in a far-reaching deal that helps reunite the country in the face of a bitter war with Islamic extremists. The deal settles a long dispute between Baghdad and Erbil, the Kurdish capital […]

Dark Age America: The Fragmentation of Technology

It was probably inevitable that last week’s discussion of the way that contemporary science is offering itself up as a sacrifice on the altar of corporate greed and institutional arrogance would field me a flurry of responses that insisted that I must hate science. This is all the more ironic in that the shoddy logic […]

Low Oil Prices Are History’s Greatest Case of Market Failure

They price oil and gas based on current demand and supply, and not based on the costs to the planet in pollution, global climate change, sea level rise, and more. Remember “Peak Oil?” The world was running out of oil, we were told: Prices would soon skyrocket, and we had better find other fuels. Well, that […]

Saudi Arabia warns oil market speculators

Saudi Arabia said on Monday that its oil policy was based on economic principles, as speculation continued to swirl after last week’s OPEC meeting of political motives aimed at other producers. It also warned market speculators. “The Kingdom’s oil policy is emanating from economic fundamentals, to achieve the economic interests of the Kingdom on the […]

Falling Oil Prices Could Cripple ‘Vulnerable’ Russia, Trigger World War III

The Cold War 2.0 is going hot, and while it may someday be fought with planes, tanks, guns and bombs, the first front is being fought with oil and shale gas. The U.S. and European sanctions against Russia will become more severe and crippling in the face of drastically falling oil prices – prices which […]

Did Peak Oil Arrive in 2014?

The recent price crash in crude oil, if it lasts for any length of time, will certainly affect oil production. The question is, just how great an effect will it have and how soon? But in this post I want to concentrate on what is, or was, happening to world oil production even before the […]

Peak Oil: What Does Any Of This Mean?

Daniel Yergin’s Pulitzer Prize (for his book The Quest) has earned him a fair amount of street cred, judging by how often his opinions are solicited on the state of fossil fuel supply and production. I haven’t read the book, but I’d be lying if I said that anyone worthy of a Pulitzer Prize doesn’t […]

The Anthropocene and Techno-Utopia

From Berlin, top enviro journalist Christian Schwagerl on his controversial new book “The Anthropocene: The Human Era and How It Shapes Our Planet”. Then two eco-feminists, Charlene Spratnak and Susan Griffin on “Techno-Utopianism and the Fate of the Earth.” Radio Ecoshock 141126 Are humans changing the planet so much that we have entered a new […]

China emerging on top in OPEC price war as it stockpiles crude oil

China is emerging as the winner from OPEC’s battle with rival oil producers as the world’s biggest energy consumer stockpiles crude. The nation’s efforts to boost reserves may increase its imports by as much as 700,000 barrels a day in 2015, according to London-based Energy Aspects Ltd. That’s more than half the global glut forecast […]

Output Forecast To 2020 Will Make Saudi Arabia Very Happy

Summary Shale oil is totally different from conventional oil – production tracks oil prices lagged one year; new wells get payback in two years and their production is hedged. U.S. shale oil production in 2015 will be 6 Million barrels/day up from 4 Million in 2014 -regardless of oil price slump. Production will be flat […]

Why crude oil will average $80 a barrel in 2015

British banker and politician Nathan Rothschild once said: “Buy when there’s blood running in the streets.” And blood is certainly spilling in the streets of the oil and gas industry. The North Sea benchmark, Brent crude, closed at $70 a barrel on Friday, declining by 40% since June. Today it’s trading at around $71. Energy […]

Oil, gold crash spell end of commodity ‘supercycle’

We are likely witnessing the painful, undignified death of the commodity investment “supercycle.” Oil prices cracked below $70 per barrel after OPEC declined to cut production. Gold sank toward $1150 an ounce after a Swiss vote to compel more central bank gold buying failed and gold holdings in the SPDR Gold ETF (GLD) shrank to […]

The Cheap Oil Curse

Remember “Peak Oil?” The world was running out of oil, prices would soon skyrocket, and we had better find other fuels. Well, that argument didn’t work out so well for environmentalists, did it? As oil reserves and those of other carbon fuels became scarce and prices rose, the law of supply and demand kicked in. […]

How the US shale gas industry has changed the global economy

The year 2014 will be remembered for an unprecedented juxtaposition of events. Two oil-producing countries in the Middle East were in a state of crisis. Relations between the West and Russia slumped to a new Cold War low. And oil prices have slumped, to $66 a barrel for Brent Crude this morning, half its recent […]

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