What’s at Stake in an Economy with Low Oil Prices

In the past, low oil prices have been seen as a boon, particularly at the gas pump. They’ve been credited with boosting economies and stirring growth. But recently oil prices have dropped so low that warning bells rippled through global markets, and they remain volatile. What does all this mean for countries and companies? How big is the […]

How far can a bridge fuel reach?

Rarely have things in the volatile world of energy aligned to make as much economic sense as, say, building new natural gas-fired power plants, expanding transmission pipelines and extending gas utility service to entire communities. Natural gas has become the fuel du jour as a boom in drilling over the past decade has sent prices plummeting. […]

The Hog Cycle And Oil Prices

Industries that have a delayed supply reaction to price (short term price inelasticity of supply) tend to exhibit a cyclical behaviour in supply and price. Delayed responses to falling and rising prices may create price and supply “overshoots”. The hog industry seems to display a regular four-year cyclicality, through the interaction of hog inventory, pig […]

UAE Offers India Free Oil To Ease Storage Woes

In an oil sector first, the oil-rich United Arab Emirates (UAE) has offered free oil to India in return for a storage deal at India’s planned underground facility as the supply glut worsens and some analysts predict that ‘’peak storage” could sending prices crashing further. The UAE’s Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) has agreed […]

Foiled by Oil

“Pemex revenues are down 70% in the past 18 months. That is what Peak Oil looks like.” “Oil in the ground is wealth only on paper – you may own that oil, but it earns you nothing until you recover and sell it. Yet paper wealth is still wealth. It goes on your balance sheet […]

How Far Can We Get Without Flying?

I’m a climate scientist who doesn’t fly. I try to avoid burning fossil fuels, because it’s clear that doing so causes real harm to humans and to nonhumans, today and far into the future. I don’t like harming others, so I don’t fly. Back in 2010, though, I was awash in cognitive dissonance. My awareness […]

BP predicts oil will peak again at $100

The oil sector may be in the doldrums – but BP can see light at the end of the tunnel and has predicted that the oil price could even return to $100 a barrel again. Oil has tumbled 70 per cent in the past 18 months to around $30 a barrel and operators have been […]

The US enters a brave new world as it begins LNG exports

Next month, the US is set to export its first cargo of LNG from the continental US. Cheniere Energy, the company that won the highly-contentious race to be the first exporter out of the gate, will have some advantages over its US peers, but the global LNG landscape has changed significantly since the company first proposed […]

Russia Now China’s Biggest Oil Partner

The output of oil from Russia reached peak levels in 2015 not seen since the era of the Soviet Union. It has now edged out Saudi Arabia as the largest exporter of crude to China. Gas prices have plummeted due to a glut of oil across the world, which is great news for consumers hoping […]

The Physics of Energy and the Economy

I approach the subject of the physics of energy and the economy with some trepidation. An economy seems to be a dissipative system, but what does this really mean? There are not many people who understand dissipative systems, and very few who understand how an economy operates. The combination leads to an awfully lot of […]

Why the Wild Descent of Oil Is Cause for Concern

The signs of oil’s madcap price collapse are everywhere. Global markets now behave like digital roller-coasters from China to Europe. Schlumberger, the largest oil field service firm, cut 10,000 jobs in 2016 and another 20,000 jobs last year. The champion of hydraulic fracturing posted a loss of $1 billion, too. Throughout the world’s financial pages, […]

Peak olive oil?

Europe’s consumers are facing 20 per cent rise in the price of olive oil after bad weather and disease devastated the continent’s olive harvest. Olive farmers in Spain and Italy, meanwhile, have seen their leading position as exporters eroded by Tunisia. “Shoppers spent an additional €231m in 2015 on olive oil,” said research group IRI […]

The First Warning Sign That Cushing May Be About To Overflow

To be sure, the rumors have been there for a while. As we first wrote in March of 2015 when it became a topic of conversation, speculation that Cushing may fill, and even overflow, has been around for nearly 10 months. As we reported then, there were floating predictions that Cushing may top out as […]

World economy seems trapped in ‘death spiral’

The global economy seems trapped in a “death spiral” that could lead to further weakness in oil prices, recession and a serious equity bear market, Citi strategists have warned. Some analysts — including those at Citi — have turned bearish on the world economy this year, following an equity rout in January and weaker economic […]

Ten Million Reasons Why Cheap Oil Might Hurt The Philippines

Cheap oil should be a good thing for a country like the Philippines that imports almost all of its fuel, but there are 10 million reasons why that may not be the case. That’s how many Filipinos work overseas, many of them on rigs, tankers and as domestic help or construction workers in oil-producing nations […]

Global oil demand growth is slowing going into 2016

(John Kemp is a Reuters market analyst. The views expressed are his own) LONDON, Feb 3 (Reuters) – The United States was one of the biggest sources of oil demand growth in 2015 but the outlook for 2016 is much more muted, according to official forecasters. The U.S. transportation sector continues to send mixed signals […]

Whatever Happened to Peak Oil?

A few months from now, this blog will complete its tenth year of more-or-less-weekly publication. In words the Grateful Dead made famous, it’s been a long strange trip:  much longer and stranger than I had any reason to expect, certainly, when I typed up that first essay and got it posted on what was still, […]

The rise of humankind, in one mesmerizing map

Greg Rakozy Today, human influence has transformed almost every part of the globe. But looking at the span of human history, this wasn’t the case until quite recently. That’s one of the many lessons from a series of fascinating maps and charts from WorldPopulationHistory.org, which shows the explosive growth of the world’s human population from 1 […]

No peak oil demand until 2040

A peak in global oil demand is unlikely to occur before 2040 in a sub-$70 oil world, according to a research report from Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BoAML). Over the medium-term, low oil prices will influence the trajectory of demand growth in three key ways, the report entitled “Global Energy Weekly: Oil is back […]

Oil-based Economies Collapsing And That’s Great For America

With oil hovering around $30 a barrel, commodities prices in free fall, and China continuing to confront a series of market-rattling growing pains, global equities have entered full correction mode. The commodities-based global economy that has developed over the past 20 plus years is collapsing, and that’s a great thing over the long run for […]

The Science Of Forecasting Long-term Oil Prices: What Not To Do

In 1992, an M.I.T. working paper that I wrote noted that forecasts of the oil prices two and three decades into the future were usually strongly in error after a couple of years. No few readers told me that they interpreted the work to mean that it was not possible to predict long-term oil prices, […]

Gail Tverberg: Why Low Oil Prices Will Not Stimulate The Economy

Wall St for Main St welcome Gail Tverberg, who is an oil market analyst and the author of Our Finite World. Gail has covered the oil market for over a decade and her work can be found on The Oil Drum web site, Peak and Prosperity and other publications. In this podcast, we asked Gail […]

The Era of Oil is Over

Leading petroleum geologists have published studies explaining that more than 95 percent of all recoverable oil has now been found. The world has not extracted all the possible oil from reserves but the global oil industry has reached its limit to produce cheap oil. Fifty years of extensive research and analysis has revealed global oil […]

Peak Oil: One-Sentence Problem-Solving

As is still the case—unfortunately, for all of us—there remains a sizeable number of individuals, organizations, and other associations determined at all costs [literally] to preserve the primacy of fossil fuels to power us into the future. Facts: good when they can be massaged to fit the partial-truth narrative required to breathe life into an […]

The Oil Crash Is Kicking Off One of the Largest Wealth Transfers In Human History

Economists are still hotly debating whether the oil crash has been a net positive for advanced economies. Optimists argue that cheap oil is a good thing for consumers and commodity-sensitive businesses, while pessimists point to the hit to energy-related investment and possible spillover into the financial system. A new note from Francisco Blanch at Bank […]

Volt vs. Prius: What’s the Best Way to Use One Gallon of Gas?

Sam Boyle is holding one gallon of regular-grade gasoline. The color of apple juice, it has the hydrocarbon content of 98 tons of buried prehistoric plant matter. It’ll ping your credit card for about $3 at our local Southern California prices. And after being combusted in a car engine, two of its 20 pounds of […]

‘Occupied’ Norway a window into our fossil fuel addiction

Okay, I admit that the premise of Norwegian television’s new political thriller series “Occupied” is far-fetched. But that premise is a window on just how addicted to fossil fuels we are. In “Occupied” Norway’s Green Party wins parliamentary elections and makes good on its (not-altogether-fictional) promise to shut down oil and natural gas production in […]

The Seneca Effect: why decline is faster than growth

      The Seneca Trap is a repository of the posts dedicated to the “Seneca Effect” that appeared, and will appear, on “Cassandra’s Legacy The idea of collapse is bad enough for most people when it deals with the running out of mineral resources along the symmetrical “bell shaped” Hubbert curve. But there is […]

Bringing the Wealth Home – intelligent Design at InishOge Farm

“We had a different notion of real wealth…we converted [our paper money] wealth into this land and home,” says Steve Unger. Mary Coll adds that they’re storing wealth in their knowledge, and by building a low-tech handmade house with no need for outside “experts” for maintenance. With their children Chloe and Finn, we tour the […]

Why Goldman Sachs Says $30 Oil Isn’t Proof of Weak Demand

Oil’s collapse to $27 a barrel last week spurred concern that, on top of the existing oversupply, the market is facing a demand crisis. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. thinks that’s wrong. Over the past six weeks, long-term oil futures — for deliveries in five years’ time — have fallen even harder than prices for immediate […]

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