The Future of Oil Demand: Peak, Plateau, or Plummet?

Projecting future levels of global oil demand is becoming an increasingly difficult challenge. With the advent of competitively priced alternatives to oil and changing policy prerogatives, some analysts have speculated that oil demand will experience a peak in the near future. This high level of uncertainty for future levels of demand has important implications for […]

Chinese Oil Demand Growth Could Slow Down Soon

Oil demand growth in the world’s biggest oil importer—China—is at risk of slowing down, at least in the coming months.   Higher oil prices play a role in this, but the main culprit is a new tighter tax regime on independent Chinese refiners, which is already choking the refining margins and profits of the so-called […]

You Can’t Stop A Wave But You Can Surf

  “A more prosperous way down would be to work at community scale“ Part Two According to both Jimmy Carter and Kris De Decker, whom we quoted in Part One, we can only solve energy poverty and energy decadence if we manage to decouple human need satisfaction from energy intensive ‘need satisfiers.’ “By equating what […]

Are Things Getting Better or Worse?

Branko Milanović grew up in Yugoslavia, during the nineteen-sixties and seventies. He became an economist at the World Bank and then a professor at CUNY; on his blog, Globalinequality, he discusses economics and reminisces about the past. Recently, he published a post about his youth. He had been reading histories of the postwar decades, by […]

Exporting America’s Gas to Asia Might Not Be a Done Deal

The following is the second piece of a multi-part series on the geopolitical implications of the U.S. Shale Revolution. You can read the first article here . North America’s production of natural gas, increasingly derived from fracturing the continent’s extensive shale deposits, has in just a few short years radically scrambled the global gas market. […]

Retiring Worn-Out Wind Turbines Could Cost Billions That Nobody Has

This is a story about death and resurrection, and as with all such stories, faith plays its part. Texas is by far the leading wind energy producer in the United States, generating more than 20,000 megawatts of electricity each year. That is about one-fourth of the nation’s wind-energy production. We can expect the Texas winds […]

Ten years after oil peak, what has changed?

July 11, 2008 was an unforgettable day for the oil industry. The price of West Texas Intermediate — a grade of crude oil used as a benchmark in oil pricing — hit an all-time high of $147 per barrel in New York. So, 10 years later, what has changed? There have been a few major […]

Trump Considers Tapping US Oil Reserve as Prices at the Pump Rise

The Trump administration is actively considering tapping into the nation’s emergency supply of crude oil as political pressure grows to rein in rising gasoline prices before congressional elections in November, two people familiar with the situation said. No decision has been made to release crude from the 660-million-barrel stockpile, known as the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, […]

Kunstler: Hope and Change Are At Hand

It seems unfair that the earnest polymath Elon Musk should go broke in the electric car business while Kylie Jenner becomes a billionaire at age 20 hawking lip gloss on Snapchat, but that’s how the American Dream rolls these late days of empire. Perhaps the lesson here, for all you MBA wannabes, is that Mr. […]

World’s Oil Cushion Could Be Stretched To The Limit, IEA Warns

The world’s oil supply cushion could be stretched to the limit due to prolonged outages, supporting prices and threatening demand growth, the International Energy Agency said on Thursday. The expected drop in Iranian crude exports this year due to renewed U.S. sanctions, coupled with a decline in Venezuela’s production and outages in Libya, Canada and […]

This Oil Price Crash Was Just A Correction

The oil market is “stretched to the limit” despite the fact that OPEC+ agreed to ramp up production following their meeting last month, according to the International Energy Agency. The IEA said that the increased supply from Saudi Arabia, its Gulf allies and Russia is “very welcome,” given the series of outages reported around the […]

European Powers Prepare To Ditch Dollar In Trade With Iran

While the White House’s frenzied anti-Iran campaign has entailed unprecedented attempts to twist the arms of the United States’ traditional European allies, the pressure may be backfiring – a reality made all the more clear by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s claims that Europe’s three major powers plan to continue trade ties with Iran without […]

Empty by Suzanne Weyn (a Peak Oil Novel for Young Readers)

Aimed at readers aged 12 to 14, this novel successfully blends high school drama and adventure with an important message about the world oil crisis. It was published in 2010, a time of mounting public concern over runaway energy costs. The book’s author, Suzanne Weyn, saw it as a means of raising awareness about the […]

S. Arabia will be ‘Reluctant to Exhaust’ its ‘Substantial’ Spare Capacity

Saudi Arabia will be “reluctant to exhaust” its “substantial” spare capacity, according to oil and gas analysts at BMI Research. “Questions are being asked as to the extent to which Saudi Arabia will increase its production, to offset shortfalls elsewhere in the market,” the analysts said in a report sent to Rigzone. “We believe that, […]

Is Oil Really Dead?

How big of a threat are renewable energies and electric cars to the oil industry and oil prices? It’s a question more than a few investors have an interest in answering, given that the Energy sector is about 6% of the S&P 500 market capitalization (which is down from around 16% in 2008). Technological advances […]

Potential supply shortages lead to oil prices increase

Oil prices have increased due to a potential supply shortage in part due to sanctions, production losses, and impending strikes. Brent crude oil prices jumped 55 cents, or 0.7%, to reach $78.62 a barrel, continuing its upward growth after rising 1.2% on the previous day, while US light crude futures rose 47 cents, or 0.7%, to […]

Gail Tverberg: The world’s weird self-organizing economy

Why is it so difficult to make accurate long-term economic forecasts for the world economy? There are many separate countries involved, each with a self-organizing economy made up of businesses, consumers, governments, and laws. These individual economies together create a single world economy, which again is self-organizing. Self-organizing economies don’t work in a convenient linear […]

Oil and Gas Industry Survival Tips

Advice is abundant on social media. Need a restaurant recommendation for your next date night or the name of a good electrician to install your new ceiling fan? Post a query to your Facebook page and you might get multiple suggestions in a matter of minutes. Need pointers on which keywords to include in your […]

‘How Many Humans Can the Earth Support?’ Mathematics Professor Addresses Ahead of World Population Day

Humans are the most populous large mammal on Earth today, and probably in all of geological history. This World Population Day, humans number in the vicinity of 7.5 to 7.6 billion individuals. Can the Earth support this many people indefinitely? What will happen if we do nothing to manage future population growth and total resource […]

Trump Is Right About Russian Energy, And Here’s What He Can Do About It

One of President Trump’s major points at the July 11, 2018 NATO meeting was that Germany is enriching Russia and making itself beholden to Russia by relying on Russian natural gas for most of its power production. He’s right. But the United States could be in a position to help Europe ween itself off of Russian […]

Behind Nord Stream 2: The Russia-to-Germany gas pipeline that fueled Trump’s anger at NATO

President Donald Trump may have just made Nord Stream 2 a household name. Ahead of a NATO meeting, the president blasted the German government on Wednesday for backing the new natural gas pipeline link from Russia to Germany. The president’s point is that the United States is shouldering much of the budget for NATO, which […]

EIA: U.S. Shortly to Become “the World’s Leading Producer of Crude Oil”

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) proclaimed on Tuesday that, if its forecasts are correct, “the United States will average nearly 12 million barrels a day (mbd) … in 2019 … mak[ing] the U.S. the world’s leading producer of crude [oil].” Those forecasts could understate the U.S. oil industry’s production, as it builds into its […]

James Howard Kunstler: The “coming” collapse? We’ve been collapsing since 2005.

I suppose many who think about the prospect of economic collapse imagine something like a Death Star implosion that simply obliterates the normal doings of daily life overnight, leaving everybody in a short, nasty, brutish, Hobbesian free-for-all that dumps the survivors in a replay of the Stone Age — without the consolation of golden ages […]

Speculation About $150 Oil And The (Inevitable) Rise Of Deep Water Companies

As this column goes to press, the world oil price is well north of $70 a barrel, a long way from the nadir of $30 a mere 30 months ago. So the oil forecaster’s parlor game is again in full swing. Will we see a return to the $150 barrel, the peak last experienced in […]

Oil shocks will hit region hard

Fuel prices are rising. More oil shocks have been predicted, and we remain unready to face a new age that is approaching rapidly. Some may not have heard of “peak oil”. If so, I suggest Googling it up. Alerts: This year Exxon Mobil has warned us to prepare for demand-driven oil shocks. Last year, Saudi […]

Why ‘Orphan’ Oil And Gas Wells Are A Growing Problem For States

When Bill West drives his weed sprayer over wheat and hay fields at his ranch northwest of Gillette, Wyoming, he occasionally bumps into debris from the more than a hundred defunct natural gas wells on his 10,000-acre property. The company that owned the wells went out of business four years ago, leaving behind fuse boxes, […]

Despite renewables gains, gas leads new US generation

Dive Brief: Despite the rise of renewable energy and the struggles of older plants such as coal, the United States’ energy infrastructure remains dominated by fossil fuels, according to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC) May infrastructure update. About 2.1 GW of new gas capacity came online in May, according to the report, compared with […]

Bernstein: Oil May Jump Past $150 On Chronic Underinvestment

A supply shortfall is lurking should major oil companies continue to underinvest in exploring for new oil reserves, and this “chronic underinvestment” is setting the stage for the next super-cycle that could see oil prices soar to $150 a barrel or more, analysts at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co said on Friday. Investors clamoring for cash returns […]

The End of Oil and Gas

The end of oil and gas has been predicted on a regular basis since 1885, yet today we use more of both than ever before and no end is in sight in the data available. Figure 1 shows worldwide energy consumption by fuel since 1965 and projected to 2035 by BP in billion tonnes of […]

More on LTO Economics in the Bakken

The goal for any commercial company is to make as high as possible profit and returns on invested (employed) capital, primarily the owners’ capital, equity. Light Tight Oil (LTO) extraction from the Bakken and Three Forks formations in North Dakota had a new high of 1,17 Mbo/d in Apr-18 according to data published in Jun-18 […]

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