Saudi Aramco international share sale might never happen

(Reuters) – (John Kemp is a Reuters market analyst. The views expressed are his own.) Saudi Aramco’s [IPO-ARAM.SE] partial privatization has loomed over the oil market for the last two years, influencing expectations about oil prices, but what if it never happens? The possibility of selling a minority stake in the giant oil company was […]

Team at MIT developing fusion power

If this is achieved, the researcher team from MIT – with financial and technical assistance from Commonwealth Fusion Systems in the United States and Italian energy company Eni – believes its system could demonstrate one of the holy grails of nuclear fusion technology: positive net energy from fusion, meaning you get more energy from what […]

A Dire Warning From The “Doomsday Vault”

Climate change alarmists are taking full advantage of the “Sudden Stratospheric Warming” (SSW) event, which occurred above the Arctic in mid-February, as further evidence that the world’s unpredictable and sometimes chaotic weather is jeopardizing humanity’s food security. The split of the polar vortex, otherwise known as an SSW event, shifted the Arctic airmass to most of Europe […]

Spooked by Quakes, Oklahoma Toughens Fracking Rules

After swarms of earthquakes caused by hydraulic fracturing, Oklahoma has introduced tougher regulations than those used by any Canadian energy regulator. Last month the Oklahoma Corporation Commission ordered all drillers to deploy seismic arrays to detect ground motion within five kilometres of hydraulic fracturing operations over a 39,000-square-kilometre area in the centre of the state. […]

Saudi Arabia Plans Its Own Shale Revolution

Saudi Arabia has big gas plans, with Aramco eyeing a twofold increase in its natural gas production over the next ten years as it seeks to switch local power plants to gas from oil, so it can export more crude. This gas, apparently, could come from shale deposits. The World Energy Council estimates that Saudi […]

The Energy Economics Of Global Cooling Are Heating Up

A huge economic boom is coming, in an industry you probably haven’t heard of: cooling. The cooling industry provides air conditioning for houses and commercial buildings, refrigerators in homes and grocery stores, and a “cold chain” to transport and deliver everything from food to vaccines around the world. As more people move to cities and […]

John Michael Greer: A Rhetorical Education

Quite a bit of the discussion on this blog and its predecessors has focused on controversial issues, the kind of thing that causes rhetoric to fly fast and thick.  Given the themes I like to discuss in these essays, that could hardly have been avoided.  Ours is an age riven by disputes, in which debate […]

Aging Oil Fields Defy Gravity to Pump More Crude

Bob Dudley, in his 38 years in the oil industry, has never seen anything like what happened with BP Plc’s old fields last year: They gushed more crude. “I cannot remember ever in my career having seen a negative decline rate,” the British oil-giant’s chief executive officer said in an interview on the sidelines of […]

Shell Says Oil’s Not Going Anywhere

There’ll be at least one home still welcoming fossil fuels in the face of a growing threat from cleaner resources, according to Royal Dutch Shell Plc. Heavy industry relies on hydrocarbons to generate extremely high temperatures and chemical reactions, according to Mark Quartermain, vice president of crude oil trading and supply at the company. Many […]

This MIT Project Says Nuclear Fusion Is 15 Years Away (No, Really, This Time)

In the 1950s, researchers predicted that the world would have nuclear fusion–which uses hydrogen atoms, an incredibly abundant fuel, to provide clean, almost limitless power, while avoiding the hazardous waste problem and catastrophic risk of current nuclear power–within 20 years. By the 1970s, predictions were still at least that far away; the same was true […]

Will water ever be worth more than oil?

Cape Town, in South Africa, has been declared a natural disaster. Credit: Phillip Gardner/University of Melbourne Nature has declared that the world’s supply of water is fixed. As a means of keeping humanity alive, it has no substitute. Recently, Cape Town has become painfully aware of the value of water. The unwelcome combination of a […]

Saudi Oil Minister Says Aramco IPO Could Be Delayed to 2019

Saudi Arabia’s energy minister hinted the initial public offering of the state oil company Aramco could be delayed until 2019, pushing back a central plank of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s plan to modernize the economy. Khalid Al-Falih also said the IPO, potentially the largest ever, would be “anchored” by a listing on Saudi Arabia’s […]

ESTIMATING TEXAS PRODUCTION-BRIDGING THE GAP

A Guest Post by Guy Minton (Details for the chart above are explained in the post.) The Texas Railroad Commission (RRC) had the oil and gas production reported online in early 2005, and became fully online for producers and the public on Feb 14, 2005. At the time it was set up, it required the […]

A Grand Bargain With Gazprom?

Can Europe, including the Eastern part, continue to profit from cheap Russian gas without succumbing to Russian energy dominance? According to a new paper from the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies (OIES), the EU should not shy away from “countervailing measures”. But these should preferably take the form of a “grand bargain” with Russia rather […]

How China Is About to Shake Up the Oil Futures Market

China, the world’s biggest oil buyer, is opening a domestic market to trade futures contracts. It’s been planning one for years, only to encounter delays. The Shanghai International Energy Exchange, a unit of Shanghai Futures Exchange, will be known by the acronym INE and will allow Chinese buyers to lock in oil prices and pay […]

India, China to fuel 50% of rise in global oil demand in 5 years

India and China are set to contribute nearly 50 per cent to the increase in the global demand for oil over the next five years, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said in its report on oil sector for 2018. According to IEA, demand is expected to grow at an annual rate of 1.2 million barrels […]

Heinberg: New U.S. Record-Level Oil Production! Peak Oil Theory Disproven! Not.

Well, I’m amazed and impressed. Tight oil production has pushed total United States petroleum output to more than 10 million barrels a day, a rate last seen almost a half-century ago. It’s a new U.S. record. Fifteen years ago I was traveling the world with a Powerpoint presentation featuring a graph of U.S. oil production […]

Exxon CEO struggles to reverse Tillerson’s legacy of failed bets

Exxon Mobil Corp’s (XOM.N) $200 million write-down last month on abandoned ventures in Russia – once its next big frontier – points to challenges facing Chief Executive Darren Woods in his second year leading the world’s largest publicly traded oil producer. Some of the biggest bets taken by his predecessor Rex Tillerson, now the U.S. […]

How to Thrive When the World’s Falling Apart: A Tiny Seven Step Program for Happiness, Beauty, Truth, and Love

“I see a lot of people telling us the world is crashing and burning but very little advice for little people able to plan for the future. Help!!” I get emails. And sometimes I even write essays about them. So. How is one to survive all this — these tumultuous, anxiety-inducing times? I’m going to take you […]

EROEI: A Useful Measure Or A Distraction?

EROEI = Usable Acquired Energy / Energy Expended It seems so simple. If the amount of energy produced relative to the amount of energy utilized in producing that energy tends to decline, at some point as the ratio approaches 1.0 (or perhaps even becomes a fraction less than 1.0) there is little if any return […]

‘Global oil sector needs $20tr investments over 25 years’

The global oil and gas industry needs to invest more than $20 trillion (Dh73.4 trillion) over the next 25 years to meet expected growth in demand and compensate for the natural decline in developed fields, Saudi Aramco Chief Executive Officer Ameen Nasser said on Tuesday. Speaking at the CERAWeek conference in Houston, Nasser said the […]

Peak oil demand, a theory with many doubters

When Haitham Al-Ghais, the director of market research for the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation, was asked about peak oil demand Monday, he smiled broadly and responded quizzically, “what demand?” Even as some oil companies like Royal Dutch Shell and BP predict oil demand will peak before 2040 – as electric vehicles hit the road and governments worldwide […]

The world has tons of oil left

The consultancy Rystad Energy has released new estimates of global oil resources that help underscore why the discussion in energy circles has transformed over the last decade from when supplies will peak to when demand will taper off, because there’s lots of oil left and being discovered. The data: “Rystad Energy estimates that liquid resources […]

Saudi Aramco CEO Promises IPO And No End To The Age Of Oil

The IPO of Saudi Aramco is “proceeding very well,” CEO Amin Nasser told the crowd at the CERAWeek conference here in Houston today. He didn’t elaborate much, saying that the ultimate decision to take the plunge would lay with the Saudi government — namely Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. A domestic listing on Riyadh’s Tadawul […]

Thoughts of a Modern-Day (Energy) Slaveholder

For all intents and purposes, we are the beneficiaries of a slave economy. We may have exchanged human chattel for the energy slaves contained in a barrel of oil and the machines that consume it, but the economics work out the same and we can’t walk away without giving up status and wealth. Thomas Jefferson […]

IEA Predicts Nightmare Scenario For OPEC

The U.S. will supply much of the world’s additional oil for the next few years, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency (IEA). Over the next three years, the U.S. will cover 80 percent of the world’s demand growth, the IEA says in its newly-released Oil 2018 annual report. Canada, Brazil and […]

Climate Conflicts: Myth or Reality?

The specter of water wars has long loomed large in political and popular imaginations. With the end of the Cold War, fresh concerns emerged that future wars would be fought not over ideology but over natural resources. The alliteratively appealing phrase of “water wars” began rolling off the tongue as United Nations leaders and politicians […]

Dr. Charles Hall: The Laws Of Nature Trump Economics

Dr. Charles Hall may not be a name you instantly recognize, but it should be. Now a Professor Emeritus of the College of Environmental Science and Forestry, Dr. Hall is a rigorous researcher of energy, oil, biophysical economics — and was a critical early pioneer in developing the key resource metric of Energy Returned On […]

Kunstler: Light it Up

It must be hard on The New York Times editors to set their hair on fire day after day in their effort to start World War Three. Today’s lead story, Russian Threat on Two Fronts Meets Strategic Void in the U.S., aims to keep ramping up twin hysterias over a new missile gap and fear […]

US Will Be the World’s Largest Oil Producer by 2023, Says IEA

The U.S. will overtake Russia to become the world’s largest oil producer by 2023, accounting for most of the global growth in petroleum supplies, a top industry monitor said Monday. U.S. crude production is expected to reach a record of 12.1 million barrels a day in 2023, up about 2 million barrels a day from […]

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