Saudis weigh IPO for Aramco

37 Comments on "Saudis weigh IPO for Aramco"

Shaved Monkey on Thu, 7th Jan 2016 5:28 pm 



Heres some more on the story
http://www.theage.com.au/business/energy/saudis-mull-ipo-of-worlds-biggest-oil-producer-20160107-gm1k6i.html

A float would require more support for a stable government as their is more skin in the game mainly white western shareholders.

BC on Thu, 7th Jan 2016 6:00 pm 



😀 😀 😀 😀 😀

The first IPO ever for a failed state. The Saudi elites IPO, cash out, and bug out of the country to escape the inevitable collapse and occupation by the Anglo-American imperial military and NATO to protect the “holy cities” (and holier oil fields).

makati1 on Thu, 7th Jan 2016 6:27 pm 



BC, their custom 747s are probably already warming up on the runways. LOL

But that would mean that the Saudi rabble would have to work for a living. I don’t see a future for any oil coming out of Arabia as the oil fields will likely be destroyed by war, civil or otherwise when the SHTF there.

NATO is close to falling apart. When it goes so goes all of the US power across most of the world. Finances may do what talking has failed to accomplish. The end of the Empire. Didn’t Rome end in a similar manner?

Yep, it is getting hotter in the ME. The borders are closing in Europe, and the Us is gonna ‘elect’ the least dirty shirt to play President. 2016 is going to be an exciting year.

Davy on Thu, 7th Jan 2016 6:37 pm 



Not to mention a grass roots lynch mob is forming from the millions of poor uneducated Chinese robbed of their life savings from an incompetent corrupt leadership:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-01-07/what-china-has-look-forward-when-it-opens-few-hours

kanon on Thu, 7th Jan 2016 8:48 pm 



I believe the Saudi led oil price decline is intended to harm renewable energy and serve geopolitical ends, much like the price decline in the 1980’s. However, renewable energy continues to grow and the geopolitical ends are further away than ever. So what to do? Let a million dupes buy into your scam so as to bolster your support base and obtain greater support from the U.S. The Wall Street lobby will be eager to send us to war on SA’s behalf if they will get the underwriting fees and trading commissions for the “world’s most valuable public company.” I also wonder what kind of reserve analysis would be in the prospectus.

GregT on Thu, 7th Jan 2016 9:56 pm 



kanon,

For starters, there is no such thing as “renewable energy”, that would be an oxymoron. Secondly, there is one currency that is doing much better than all of the others as a result of the recent pullback in oil prices.

Always follow the money. Everything else is usually just a distraction.

Practical on Thu, 7th Jan 2016 10:09 pm 



GregT, how is there no such thing as renewables, biomass for heat, feces into natural gas… Renewable and greenhouse gas mitigation. micro hydro, or copying the ancient tech of water pumping nag windmills seems pretty renewable. And as far as cops not being heavy handed in Germany, I have seen so much riot police violence against people protesting for positive change, that reading accounts of cops underestimating and codling true assholes is depressing and suspicious.

antaris on Thu, 7th Jan 2016 10:33 pm 



Prac, if you take oil out of the equation then “renewables” become very basic. One day oil will be out of the equation. So will a lot of the population.

GregT on Thu, 7th Jan 2016 10:36 pm 



Renewable sources of energy for sure, harvesting those energy sources however, requires non-renewable resources and non-renewable fossil fuels. Except for perhaps copying ancient tech, which will never run modern industrial society. In that regard, I stand corrected, but I’m sure that wasn’t what kanon was referring to.

German cops? Suspicious? Follow the money. Once again.

makati1 on Thu, 7th Jan 2016 11:35 pm 



The only ‘renewables’ are those directly or indirectly harvested from the sun by plants. Animals cannot do it. Neither can fish, or even humans. We consume the plants, or animals that have consumed plants, and our body converts a small part of their energy into useful energy to power our body to do work. There are NO other energy ‘renewables’, only some form of energy recovery using hydrocarbon energy assisted methods.

Burning woody plants is a way to use the sun’s energy that does not require eating it, but that energy is not going to do more than cook our food or maybe warm our huts a bit.

Wind requires a means to harness the spinning blades made of wood(?), but how? Metal(mines) gears wear out, if you use them to turn a screw pump for water. Ditto for water wheels to grind grain.

I am always open to a REAL example of ‘renewable’ energy that does NOT use hydrocarbon energy to exist. If it uses mined/refined materials of any kind, it is not ‘renewable’ without hydrocarbon energy in huge amounts.

http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2011/12/machines-making-machines-making.html

Some things never change…

Thomas on Fri, 8th Jan 2016 7:58 am 



To attract investors money Aramco has to disclose their calculation of oil reserves and ressources. In the past these ressources were reported unchanged more or less over 20 years. This is very unlikely, because auf new findings and constant production.

So, an IPO will be VERY interesting 🙂

Thomas on Fri, 8th Jan 2016 8:05 am 



@GregT: Right, to produce machines for the harvesting od RE sources you need energy and material.

It is absolutely possible to use renewable energy only for the production and maintenance (e.g. synthetic oil and gas from H2 and CO2).

Material is mainly non-renewable (but recycable) but in todays view nearly abundable (in the meaning of: there is plenty enough to build as many pv modules / wind mills to power the whole world). Some special elements are rare but replacable.

Practical on Fri, 8th Jan 2016 8:09 am 



Makati, yes all renewables, other than geothermal are somehow sourced from the sun, same with fossil fuels. Humans cant do it? When you’re sitting in the sun on a cold day are we not using a renewable power for free then? You always want an example of something requiring zero fossil fuels, would you agree that a biogas reactor made of basic hand made primitive non cement materials, using shit as fuel, wouldn’t be a true renewable?
Also I went without heat to see how bad it would be to try to conserve efficiency in an electric car. Zero degree day, hour commute, no heat at all (heater core was frozen ) It was very painful, and I am pretty accustomed to cold. If I owned an EV i would be buying a 12v electric blanket and getting a model with heated seats. I feel that defrost is not always gonna be a big necessity because at least in my area, when it is truly frigid it is usually very dry.

makati1 on Fri, 8th Jan 2016 8:33 am 



Practical, I missed that one as I forgot about radiant heat on a sunny day. Thanks. Not that you are likely to sit in the sun on a cold day unless there is no wind blowing. Any wind would negate the warming. But it does work and does not require hydrocarbons.

You must live in a very unusual area. When my defroster didn’t work it usually meant I had to stop frequently and scrape frost or ice from the windshield. And I owned many cars with that problem as my usual car was a junk yard refugee that I picked up for a few hundred dollars, drove it until it died and then bought another junker. I hated to pay the dealer 10-15% of the car’s cost just to drive a new one off the lot. Did that just once and got over the new car lust at age 21.

I do not miss cold or owning a car, with all of it’s problems and expenses. I walk to the curb and raise my arm for a taxi about a dozen times a year. Or I take a bus once or twice a year. All the other times, I walk.

Practical on Fri, 8th Jan 2016 8:55 am 



The defroster is a necessity, and your average 20degree day i will use it a lot, but when it is really freaking cold it is usually morning or night when it has been a cloudless dry night, therefore the humidity is not usually high enough to cause a frost issue.

I agree on the outlook towards new cars, I have never been a good consumer of the typical trendy new crap. If things dont collapse, I will wait until the cars get much more efficient, and then I will buy used… Or get to the point I dont need my own vehicle, ideally.

Davy on Fri, 8th Jan 2016 9:05 am 



The modern term renewable will be mute soon. The terms to employ are traditional hunting, gathering, and permaculture renewables. The rest will most likely be a salvage of our decaying world. This will involve a hybrid mixture of what works per your local. Metals are everywhere to use in primitive manufacture. Fuels will likewise be here and there, on and on…..

My point with this salvage and hybrid world is its reality will become reality through a process of decay. If we have a long emergency we will surely have both modern and a hybrid.

In those areas that can no longer connect fully with the global salvage and hybrid technologies will dominate. We don’t know what the minimum operating level is for globalism. We don’t know the configurations of nations, regions, and locals. We know some nations are not vital systematically but not in what combination.

We are going to have a new reality that is an old reality. We are going to salvage and gather what we can from the anthropocene. It is likely our modern world will limp on in places just like the Byzantine Rome formed out of a collapsing Roman Empire. We may have nothing to. We are at a time of choices on many levels but we have no choices as to the historic trend IMHO.

GregT on Fri, 8th Jan 2016 9:47 am 



“there is plenty enough to build as many pv modules / wind mills to power the whole world”

The whole world does not need to be powered by human generated energy, for that we have the sun, the only energy source the whole world ever needed. The things that we need to generate energy for are man-made, and all require non-renewable resources and fossil fuels in their resource extraction, manufacture, distribution, maintenance, and recycling/replacement. While it may be possible to utilize alternate sources of energy production throughout the entire process, it is not possible on a scale that matters to us in the big scheme of things. Alternate energy will not power modern industrial society, at least not for all of us. It all boils down to EROIE.

If your utopian future is one where the elite continue to jet set around the world, while the masses live in abject poverty and slavery, then sure, a possibility. This would not solve our more serious problems however, such as overpopulation, ocean acidification, climatic instability, loss of biodiversity, species extinction, water stress, desertification, sea level rise, etc. For those problems we need to stop pretending that we are above nature, and we need to learn how to live in harmony within the Earth’s natural biosphere. If we fail to do so, we face our own extinction. It may very well be too late for us to change our attitudes already.

GregT on Fri, 8th Jan 2016 9:55 am 



Furthermore TomS,

You are being completely unrealistic. In other words, you are living in an extreme state of denial. Wake up man.

Practical on Fri, 8th Jan 2016 11:09 am 



GregT, you really never know. Maybe we maintain a plateau of fossil fuels long enough to wake up and take action. We are burning large amounts of fuel having tankers going port to port looking for a market. This fuel would be better spent building up some sort of infrastructure that could allow us to produce and or recycle modern industrial materials out of renewables. If we can make molten salt using solar energy, why cant use it to smelt metal, or make cement, or glass?

I do not see it happening, I just feel that people who know what the hell is going on shouldn’t give up hope, prep for your own future, but I try to not completely give up hope that people wont wake the fuck up.

Thomas on Fri, 8th Jan 2016 11:25 am 



GregT,

“It all boils down to EROIE.”

The factor for Wind and PV is 20-40, so there is no real problem with that.

I absolutely agree that we need a less ressource consuming society. “Every year a new Smartphone” or “Fly from Paris to New York for shopping” is a horrible waste of ressource and energy with minimal improvement for comfort or happiness.

But it is no question that existing technology can provide a comfortable life with minimal use of non-renewable ressources.

makati1 on Fri, 8th Jan 2016 7:13 pm 



Thomas, it is you that does not accept that there will be ZERO non-renewable resources soon. When the system goes down, it is not coming back up, ever.

makati1 on Fri, 8th Jan 2016 7:27 pm 



Practical, missed your previous uneducated comment. Look up the energy requirements to just refine glass or metals, from existing junk. You will find that it is almost as much as from raw ores.

I worked in a foundry that made rock crushing steel parts and switches for rail tracks. They had two small electric furnaces to melt the scrap metal to a temperature of ~1,800F (white hot) so it could be poured into sand molds. Those furnaces had their own electric substation because they used as much electric as the nearby town of 30,000 people.

Glass is even worse as it too has to be at least 3,200F to be poured or molded and cannot be done in large batches unless you have an equally large complex of machines to use it before it solidifies. The glass plant near where I lived was almost a mile long, just to make some plate glass.

Physics does not change because you want it to. You won’t be making new window glass in your backyard out of the one that got broken. It took a lot of work to make the glass in the old cathedrals and whole forests of trees to supply the heat. Glass was rare before the Hydrocarbon Age. So was steel or iron or any metal. If you cannot use it in it’s original shape, it will not be used.

kanon on Fri, 8th Jan 2016 10:39 pm 



The article is about the Saudi plan to sell shares in their oil company, but once renewable energy was mentioned the Saudi’s have been forgotten. Do you notice how the nattering nabobs of negativity are so fixated on running down renewable energy? Since the arguments of “too expensive” “unproven” and “impractical” have all failed, now they have cleverly discovered that in a fossil fuel powered corporate society, everything depends on fossil fuels. I can tell them another secret: misery loves company, and they will find lots with their fellow Saudi Oil shareholders.

GregT on Fri, 8th Jan 2016 11:42 pm 



Practical,

‘People’ are not going to “wake the fuck up”. The sooner that you come to the acceptance of that fact, the sooner you will be able to move on.

GregT on Fri, 8th Jan 2016 11:44 pm 



kanon,

You are confused.

GregT on Sat, 9th Jan 2016 12:09 am 



Thomas(S),

“But it is no question that existing technology can provide a comfortable life with minimal use of non-renewable resources.”

The ‘Sun’ provided a ‘comfortable life for hundreds of thousands of years, with sustainable use of “non-renwable” resources.

That ‘technology’ still exists.

Davy on Sat, 9th Jan 2016 2:17 am 



It is not about “running down renewables”. It is about keeping renewables in reality. Renewables are a vital transition element of the status quo. They will be a valuable resource either as-is-in-place or salvaged for future use in a new configuration. Renewables are fossil fuel based. Renewable based industry has little chance of surviving the end of the status quo. There is no evidence they can achieve a “break out” and offer power and products that support enough societal complexity to power a modern industry to replicate and reproduce like we see with fossil fuels.

The economy needed to support renewables is a product of globalism and fossil fuels. It must have economies of scale and global distribution of dispersed materials. Its needs are dispersed so it requires globalism vast distribution network. Its needs for power are thereby global.

Keeping renewables in reality means acknowledging the vital nature of renewables in increased resiliency and offering sustainability by extending fossil fuels. There are multiple sweet spots of high value for renewables.

Renewables are dirty and intensive manufacturing process start to finish. They are not clean. They may be cleaner but they are not clean. They are expensive and not an option for the poor. These defects of renewables makes them only partially effective carbon emission reduction stools. To replace fossil fuels in a world trying to grow consumption and naturally growing population would require a huge build out destroying vast areas of habitat, requiring huge amounts of resources and generating huge emissions itself.

Society has clearly hit or is near limits of growth across the board. We are now struggling to maintain what we have. What we have is required to build out renewables. We are in an energy trap of not having the global funds to support existing infrastructure necessary to build out new infrastructure. Some changeover will be achieved but not enough in scale of time and quantity. The amount of current renewables compared to the total indicated a disconnect with those who claim this can happen.

If you believe in the cornucopian narrative of continuous growth with substitution that is renewable then you are nothing more than an exceptionalist who believes humans are above limits of development in a finite world. I am an ardent supporter of renewables. I am investing in them for my doomstead. I firmly believe the old use of renewables through permaculture food, animal, and mechanical utilization is the ultimate answer. This points to lifestyle and attitude changes. The status quo is not capable of this except at much lower scale at the individual and local levels. This local effort will be dwarfed by the challenges of a failing status quo

These changes will not solve our overshoot problem because we are too far into overshoot to change back to a tradition 19th century utilization of renewables of sun, wind, animal, and biomass and support existing complexity, consumption, and population levels let alone further growth. The cornucopian narrative of continuous growth through substitution through innovation from increasing technology and knowledge is increasingly be proven wrong by nature herself. We are failing on multiple fronts and denying we are failing.

Those who advocate renewables as a silver bullet are deceiving themselves and others. This is a false narrative of misplaced hope and inability to face an ugly and painful rebalance that will be nothing more or less than a species bottleneck into a much lower level of consumption with much lower population.

This existential rebalance will likely happen quickly within a generation. Renewables can make this pain and suffering less by being a vital transition source. They will be vital in a postmodern hybrid world of what remains of the modern and the new-old traditional ways. Salvage and utilization of the existing resources will be vital. Any build-out of renewables either large scale status quo or focused on off the grid and locally or individually sustainable are good. The optimum is renewables at the end user and focused on food production support. Any renewable production is better than the mal-investment in the status quo we see everywhere today.

GregT on Sat, 9th Jan 2016 2:52 am 



“I am an ardent supporter of renewables. I am investing in them for my doom stead.”

The unfortunate side effects of delusion, it becomes self perpetuating.

onlooker on Sat, 9th Jan 2016 8:23 am 



Yes Renewables offer a means to maintain some semblance of a larger society and community. But as you guys note it does not offer any chance of sustaining modern industrial civilization. I may add that every day that passes makes any sort of transition to renewable more problematic as the interconnected world-wide economy is fast approaching its demise and as ACCESSIBLE fossil fuels become scarcer. I applaud those who already have invested in off-grid and renewable living for they are the pioneers/teachers in this brave new world we are fast approaching.

ghung on Sat, 9th Jan 2016 9:27 am 



GregT said; “The unfortunate side effects of delusion, it becomes self perpetuating.”

Off-gridders are some of the least deluded people I know. They’re actually in the practice of becoming dis-associated from centralised top-down complex systems, and understand those challenges. Most also understand the unsustainability of most of the technology they employ and are working the problem, day in and day out, unlike the majority of people they know, while sometimes being ostracised for not being “team players”.

I’ve spent the last couple of evenings making copies of the “SurvivorLibrary” which arrived on DVD earlier this week. I’m trying to figure out how to preserve this vast amount of information by other-than-electronic means; thousands of books and magazines from times when folks largely had to do things by other-than-industrial-scale means. Some is, of course, outdated, but things like how to properly hand-butcher a cow, how to make butter and cheese, entire libraries on how to teach children reading, writing, and arithmetic, weaving, etc. (even how to build looms), will become more valid again. Gun lovers? Manuals for just about every gun since the civil war. Early anaesthesia? All there. Home dental work? Check. Paper making, printing, early radio (tubes?), animal husbandry…. Hard to find anything that isn’t there.

Meanwhile, my brother called, needing me to help figure out his new printer, and make Chrome NOT his default browser.

Davy on Sat, 9th Jan 2016 9:41 am 



G-man, if you ever offer your library consolidation and preservation project for sale I will buy one. You have been a wealth of knowledge with my doomstead efforts.

ghung on Sat, 9th Jan 2016 10:04 am 



Davy: http://www.survivorlibrary.com .About $36 on DVD or blu-ray, or free to download. I ordered the DVDs because it’s about 140GB and growing. It took me about 11 hours just to transfer everything to our home ‘cloud’.

Our home cloud is a NAS RAID server in a fire safe, which is in the gun safe which is in our fireproof/bomb-proof/EMP-proof safe room; our repository of family stuff; pictures, music, important papers and letters…. I’m currently uploading pictures of my daughter’s and grandkid’s’ trip to Hawaii over the holidays. I’m also scanning/uploading old family photos that were rediscovered recently.

Davy on Sat, 9th Jan 2016 10:12 am 



Thank you sir!

GregT on Sat, 9th Jan 2016 11:35 pm 



“Off-gridders are some of the least deluded people I know. They’re actually in the practice of becoming dis-associated from centralised top-down complex systems, and understand those challenges.”

Thanks for the compliment ghung, I like to think so myself. I still have a long ways to go however, but I’m working on it.

That doesn’t change the fact that my PV systems are not renewable. They are fossil fuel extenders, nothing more. Pretending otherwise, IMHO, is delusional.

Davy on Sun, 10th Jan 2016 6:19 am 



My reference to PV systems was of course not delusional because anyone who reads what I say knows my position on renewables. Someone was just interested in mislabeling me and ghung call them out. Someone doesn’t like the fact I have a voice.

Thanks G for the link. I ordered the dvd’s yesterday. I have a library of doom and prep that is extensive and your link source has instantly greatly increase it. It is hard to search old book stores for some of this info. Your link is a digital wealth of that info. I thank you for so many other ideas. I am also in the process of ordering a high tunnel. You got me interested in that. I knew about them before but only got motivated after listening to you and your experiences.

ghung on Sun, 10th Jan 2016 10:45 am 



Thanks Greg and Davy. Davy; I’ve been browsing some of the material in the SurvivorLibrary and some of it is/will be extremely useful. A lot of it is also entertaining; how people wrote and communicated 100 years ago or more. Anyway, I think it at least offers a glimpse at where we’re likely to be headed back to, according to Greer and some others; a reversion to less complexity and greater localism and self-reliance.

Greg; If anyone wants to go back to my posts over the years, they’ll see that my opinions on so-called renewables don’t include maintaining industrial civilization. As I see it, the advantages of adopting local uses of alternatives include a lot of other advantages simply because the industrial age will either fade away painfully, or fail spectacularly. My journey to becoming more “off-grid” is all about avoiding traps and improving our options. Redundancy and resilience going forward means seemingly small things like not having energy bills, no debts to pay, and the ability to greatly reduce food costs.

I don’t worry about the stock markets much because that isn’t where my investments are, although my wife has a modest portfolio. I don’t worry about interest rates much, or home prices, because our home/land is paid for and we don’t plan to sell and go anywhere else. We don’t worry about energy costs because those costs are pretty much fixed. I don’t worry about the grid going down because we don’t even know if it does, at least until I hear about it on the radio or someone calls.

What happens in 10-20 years is, in detail, unknowable, but our lifestyle here is a big part of our retirement plan; minimise our dependence and exposure to industrial age paradigms we consider to be quite insane for the most part. I’m betting our plan works longer than BAU does. Either way, we’re still in a great place.

GregT on Sun, 10th Jan 2016 3:08 pm 



Thanks ghung,

Completely agree with all of your above. My wife and myself are doing the same as you, although you do have a rather large head start on us. I appreciate all of your input, and have been paying great attention to all of your posts for these past few years.

Our grid here is 100% hydro, as ‘renewable’ as it gets. The small hydro electric facility that serves our community is less than one mile from our home. We have a small PV system that will run the pump to our shallow well, and will be installing a larger system this spring, mainly for refrigeration in the event of power outages. Grid tied is recently available in our area and as time goes on we will probably add to the system to take advantage of that.

I am well aware of the limitations of PV, as we have run a small system on our travel trailer for over 15 years. Batteries, inverters, chargers, transfer switches, and controllers all have useful lifespans, and will eventually need replacement. In 15 years I have needed to replace batteries once, and the second set is reaching the end of their useful lifespan. We had had one controller board burn out, and an AC transfer switch. When the sun is shining the system works completely stand alone, as long as we respect it’s limitations. It is great to be able to camp in remote locations and have a reliable source of electricity. Not so great in the winter months though, especially when it pours rain for weeks on end.

My issue here is with how easy it is for people to toss around the ‘renewable’ nomenclature. PV systems are not renewable. The terminology is misleading, and an entire ‘culture’ has sprung up around this deception. I find it irresponsible to continue to use this terminology, as many people do not know any better, and believe that alternate sources of electric power generation will allow us to continue on with some semblance of BAU. Nothing could be further from the truth. People are going to need to learn to live much simpler, less energy intensive lifestyles, and they will need to learn to be far more self sufficient and resilient. Alternate energy production can be a good transitional tool, but it is not the answer to our predicament, and is in no way renewable without fossil fuels.