Saudi Vice Oil Minister Sees Price Surge After Cutbacks

The scale of the global oil and gas industry’s spending cuts are making another surge in energy prices possible by diminishing future supply, Saudi Vice Minister of Petroleum & Mineral Resources Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman said. Investments have been cut by $200 billion this year and will drop another 3 percent to 8 percent next […]

Kunstler: The Leviathan

The economic picture manufactured by the national consensus trance has never been more out of touch with reality in my lifetime. And so the questions as to what anyone might do can hardly be addressed. How can I protect my savings? Who do I vote for? How do I think about where my country is […]

Saudi Arabia will not stop pumping

Saudi Arabia is determined to stick to its policy of pumping enough oil to protect its global market share, despite the financial pain inflicted on the kingdom’s economy. Officials have told the Financial Times that the world’s largest exporter will produce enough oil to meet customer demand, indicating that the kingdom is in no mood […]

The Energy World Is Flat

In The Energy World Is Flat: Opportunities from the End of Peak Oil, Daniel Lacalle and Diego Parrilla explore 10 forces that drive the future of energy. Both authors have extensive experience in the energy field. Lacalle’s background is in energy portfolios as an economist, energy sector analyst, and fund manager. Parrilla is a hedge […]

Without Keystone, industry must find new paths for oil

Following the Obama administration’s rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline, the oil industry faces the tricky task of making sure the crude oil targeted for the pipeline still gets where it needs to go. The pipeline, first proposed by TransCanada Corp. in 2008, was projected to carry 800,000 barrels a day of crude from Canada […]

Getting it wrong on recycling

Let’s see what those disparaging America’s rate of recycling as “too high” either get completely wrong or fail to understand. You can read recent commentary suggesting that the recycling rate is too high here, here and here. The number one complaint is that it costs more to recycle some categories of waste than to put […]

Saudi Minister Says Asia Will Drive Oil Demand

OPEC chief joins Naimi in seeing Asia as main hub for growth Russia targets doubling oil exports to Asia-Pacific by 2035 Oil demand will soon reflect the “attractiveness” of the current level of crude prices, and Asia will be a vital engine of economic expansion for decades, Saudi Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi said. OPEC’s chief joined […]

Matthew Schneider-Mayerson: Resource Scarcity and Libertarian Political Culture

My dissertation uses the “peak oil” movement as a lens to analyze the convergence of apocalyptic environmental thinking and libertarian political culture in the recent United States. The “peak oil” movement was a twenty-first century American social movement of Americans who came to believe that oil depletion and other environmental problems would lead to the […]

Exxonomics 101

“You don’t need 100,000 marines to secure windmills in North Dakota.”  The New York Times, which is quickly becoming to print media what Fox is to television news, has done what no first year news stringer should do. It buried the lead. It buried the lead on what is likely to become one of the […]

Persian Gulf Producers Delay Oil Projects

Persian Gulf oil producers are delaying oil projects and squeezing contractors for hundreds of millions of dollars in savings, as the pain from low crude prices spreads to state-owned energy companies struggling to pump at full tilt. Saudi Arabian Oil Co.—known as Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest crude producer—has pushed back by a year the […]

Oil company defaults are coming

Oil companies of all hues loaded up on massive amounts of debt to fund rigs and fancy new drilling equipment. The problem is the companies were banking on oil prices closer to $100 oil when they took on the debt. Now oil is around $45 and no one is expecting prices to hit $100 any […]

Abiotic Oil, Peak Oil, and Saudi Arabia

Over the past few weeks I’ve been drawing attention to the growing crisis facing Saudi Arabia, a crisis exacerbated in part by Russia’s intervention in Syria. Regular readers will recall that I even blogged about recent Saudi overtures to Russia, in some versions, even holding out a membership in OPEC to that country. Russia is […]

Obama rejects Keystone XL project

President Obama rejected a presidential permit Friday for the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, citing concerns about its impact on the climate. “America’s now a global leader when it comes to taking serious action to fight climate change,” Obama told reporters, standing in the Roosevelt Room beside Vice President Biden and Secretary of State John F. Kerry. […]

Vehicle of the Future Might Be an Electric Tricycle

The latest solution for congested cities is an electric, autonomous tricycle for adults. The challenge of moving people and things around the world’s dense, growing major cities is bad and getting worse. Ninety percent of the world’s population growth in this century will be in “megacities,” and cities will soon account for 80 percent of […]

Importance of agriculture to US security scrutinized

The U.S. needs to stay a step ahead of key challenges faced by its agriculture sector, especially resource scarcity, the threat of bioterrorism and greater productivity as world population expands from about 6 billion people in 2015 to 9 billion by 2050, said Ambassador John Negroponte, former U.S. deputy secretary of state under President George […]

Apartments Waste 33% of The Energy They Use

Energy Awareness Month is the time to promote the importance of finding more efficient ways to use energy, such as weather stripping, upgrading to LED lights and implementing a programmed thermostat. Planning these efforts and taking action will ensure a significant decrease in energy consumption making your building more sustainable and efficient. In fact, the […]

Saudi carbon storage project may boost recovery rates

Saudi Arabia’s first carbon capture and storage pilot project, located at its Ghawar oilfield, may boost oil recovery rates by 20 percentage points, oil minister Ali al-Naimi said. Carbon storage schemes are being promoted around the world as a way to slow global warming by preventing the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But […]

Only 1 Percent Of Bakken Shale Is Profitable At These Prices

Only 1 percent of the Bakken Play area is commercial at current oil prices based on my analysis that follows. Only 4 percent of horizontal wells drilled since 2000 meet the EUR (estimated ultimate recovery) threshold needed to break even at current oil prices, drilling and completion, and operating costs. The leading producing companies evaluated […]

Oil Megaprojects Won’t Stay On The Shelf For Long

One casualty of the oil price downturn could be the megaproject.  For years, as conventional oil reserves depleted and became increasingly hard to find, oil companies ventured into far-flung locales to find new sources of production. Extracting oil from these frontier areas required more advanced technology and a lot more capital: Ultra deepwater, Arctic offshore, […]

America, oil power

“Freedom is the right to question and change the established way of doing things. It is the continuous revolution of the marketplace. It is the understanding that allows us to recognize shortcomings and seek solutions.” –Ronald Reagan, talking to students at Moscow State University, May 31st, 1988. Gas prices are plummeting like the bit of […]

With Exxon Mobil Under Investigation, Is Climate Change Debate Becoming Criminalized?

Just to summarize, N.Y. Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is reportedly investigating Exxon Mobil XOM -1.19% for deceiving the public about climate change, and leading environmental groups are calling on the U.S. Department of Justice to do the same. Because, it seems, ExxonMobil has funded a wide variety of scientific research, most of which confirmed “liberal” views […]

Dear Fellow Americans: Do You Have Any Idea What’s Being Done In Your Name In Syria?

Americans have some vague understanding that the U.S. wants Syria’s Assad to go, while Russia wants him to stay. And Americans know that the U.S. “war against ISIS” hasn’t done much, while the Russians have been pounding Syrian targets with jets. But Americans have no idea that the U.S. is deploying fighter jets designed solely […]

Scientists Just Analyzed Dozens of Natural Disasters. Can You Guess Which Ones We Made Worse?

California’s epic wildfire season has our fingerprints all over it. Climate scientists are pretty good at figuring out the causes of long-term trends. We know that dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere will make global temperatures rise over time. But pinning down the cause of any single weather event—a specific heat wave, hurricane, or drought—is […]

Iranian Oil Goes Back on the Market

After years of sanctions, the country is boosting production and aiming to win customers back from the Saudis and Russians. The fate of the oil market in 2016 depends in large part on a series of oil fields with names such as Ahwaz, Gachsaran, Bibi Hakimeh, and Darkhovin. All of them are pumping crude buried […]

‘Peak demand’ Means World May Never See Oil at $100 a Barrel Again

Just as the energy industry has brushed aside concerns that the world could run out of oil, industry executives now say they believe it is demand, rather than supply, that is nearing its apex. In 1985, Ian Taylor, today the chief executive of the world’s largest oil trader Vitol, was part of a team at […]

Crude oil smells bad and could kill you

Crude oil — black gold as it’s known — is not as simple a commodity to turn a profit on as actual gold. Sure, with volatility in the oil market it might seem tempting to buy a few barrels, store them in your garage and wait for the price to go up. But as Bloomberg’s […]

Energiewende

Podcast: Play in new window | Download Subscribe: iTunes | Android | RSS Guest Craig Morris, editor of Renewables International and lead author of EnergyTransition.de On Twitter: @PPChef Links Craig Morris: Did German renewables just peak above 80% of demand?(Aug 27, 2015) Craig Morris: German utilities want to shut down more power plants(Aug 25, 2015) Chris Nelder: Myth-busting Germany’s Energy Transition (2013) Chris Nelder: Why America needs a feed-in tariff (2011) Energy Transition […]

Oops! Low oil prices are related to a debt bubble

Why is the price of oil so low now? In fact, why are all commodity prices so low? I see the problem as being an affordability issue that has been hidden by a growing debt bubble. As this debt bubble has expanded, it has kept the sales prices of commodities up with the cost of […]

A Conversation with Gail Tverberg of OurFiniteWorld.com

A conversation with Gail Tverberg of OurFiniteWorld.com. Gail Tverberg is an analyst who has been researching the connection between oil limits and the economy for nearly 10 years.  She writes a widely-followed blog called Our Finite World. Her background is as an actuary, working as a consultant to insurance companies. She also has a foot […]

Can The U.S. Rebalance The Global Oil Market?

Summary US operator oil production cash flow is down 75% from its peak in June 2014. Cash flow, rig count, and well count all starting to find equilibrium. US oil supply response in the face of current price may be enough to balance market. As third quarter earnings continue at full steam, it’s hard to […]

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