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Page added on February 8, 2016
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, economists have adopted a new noun: stagnation, stagnation and stagnation.
In Aberdeen, Scotland, former oil workers line up at food banks.
In Fort McMurray, Canada’s oilsands mining centre, Nexen shut down a 50,000 barrel a day facility — a dramatic first. Dogged by wonky technology and a recent explosion, the Long Lake steam plant consistently failed to reach production targets (70,000 a day). It extracted some of the world’s dirtiest oil.
Walmart, a conglomerate founded on the assumption that cheap energy will last forever, is closing more than 200 stores in the United States and Brazil, where the economy has gone south.
In the U.S., scores of energy companies dependent on fracking have gone bankrupt.
Every continental petro-state — Alaska, Alberta, Colorado, Wyoming, Texas and Louisiana, North Dakota and many others — has now declared extreme budgetary shortfalls due to huge drops in oil and gas revenue.
The International Energy Agency predicts “the oil market could drown in oversupply” in 2016.
And so, the descent of oil has become a sort of Sherman’s March on globalization.
The status-quo pundits say don’t worry. The world is awash in oil due to the brute force of fracking and Alberta’s faltering bitumen boom.
Markets are just experiencing another wacky correction in supply and demand, and business as usual will continue. Relax, add the pundits — lower energy prices tend to revive economies by putting more money in the hands of consumers, and all will be well.
But the global economy is now confounding academic theorists. Falling gasoline prices haven’t propped up the economy, or stimulated growth for that matter. In fact, global finance appears to be driving into another recession while debt grows, innovation disappears, capital investment recedes and wages stagnate.
So there must be another story.
A monster called ‘diminishing returns’
There is, and it’s a rather grim energy fairy tale. This one shows how the world’s economy depends on the quality of energy burned, and not the amount of money spent. When economies spend cheap oil, GDP rises; when they switch to costly and unconventional stuff, growth comes to a screeching halt.
In this unfolding story, cheap credit played a big role. It allowed an industry to carelessly borrow trillions to chase ultra-expensive and risky resources such as bitumen and shale oil.
An energy industry laden with toxic debt is now earning less money than what it costs to shovel bitumen or frack shale. And this kind of debt is not going to end well for financial markets. Or for ordinary people.
But the darkest character in this fairy tale is the monster called diminishing returns.
On a diet of cheap oil, the world financial system grew on energy surpluses like a wildfire dines on trees in a forest.
But no more. The cheap stuff is gone, and companies are now frantically fracking North Dakota at a cost of $60 a barrel or mining northern Alberta’s heavy bitumen at costs as high as $80 a barrel. With oil at $30 a barrel, many companies are, as respected Houston analyst Art Berman recently put it, “losing their asses.”
Diminishing returns explain why. Imagine a 20-year-old vehicle that now costs more money to maintain than it does to drive. Every time the owner pours more cash and energy into the clunker, the benefits and rewards keep shrinking. An old car can be a treadmill into poverty.
In a 2014 paper for the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, David Murphy, an energy expert at St. Lawrence University, chronicles what diminishing returns really mean in energy terms.
For every barrel of energy invested in global oil production, 17 are now extracted and turned into wealth. (Nearly 100 years ago, one barrel of investment yielded 100 barrels more, a cornucopia that built the global economy.)
But the industry must now drill deeper and deeper into ugly reservoirs and then fracture them apart to capture molecules of gas or oil. As a consequence, U.S. oil production yields only 11 barrels for every barrel invested, and that number is fast declining. Ultra-heavy bitumen and other unconventional hydrocarbons capture returns of less than 10 and in many cases as low as three.
Energy resources that deliver such paltry returns are civilization shrinkers. They cannibalize other resources and offer no energy surplus.
An investor’s nightmare
As Murphy notes, and as The Tyee has documented over the years, unconventional hydrocarbons require more capital, water and energy to extract. They destroy more land and deliver poorer energy returns. They are an investor’s nightmare and represent the end of business as usual.
Take fracking for example. The unpredictable technology now accounts for 25 to 50 per cent of a well’s drilling costs. It requires extensive real estate and lots of fresh water. Injecting fluids to crack rock underground not only creates earthquake hazards but also aggravates the billion-dollar liability of leaky wellbores. Furthermore, the industry admits that frack jobs don’t even work or hit the target zone about 60 per cent of the time.
One analyst recently noted that “this method of extracting petroleum is like grocery shopping in the supermarket with a backhoe. Yes, you did indeed scoop a lot of eggs into your cart, but look behind you. It’s a totally ham-fisted way to extract finite resources, unless the only goal is short-term maximization of production.”
Diminishing returns also dog forms of renewable energy. You can only build so many wind farms, for example, before those turbines remove more and more of the energy from atmospheric motion and eventually reduce wind speeds. At that point, wind energy becomes a model of inefficiency, looking more like an Alberta steam injection well where industry boils water with methane to melt cold bitumen out of the ground.
The implications of diminishing returns for oil are stark: the more society invests in unconventional hydrocarbons, warns Murphy, the more “growth will become harder to achieve and come at an increasingly higher financial, energetic and environmental cost.”
As society switches to energy resources of lower and lower quality, simply maintaining the flow of net energy to society will require that companies and nations accrue more debt to spend a proportionally larger amount of capital on gross energy extraction that comes with dirtier environmental impacts, such as carbon-spewing bitumen.
Diminishing returns from oil production “indicate that we should expect the economic growth rates of the next 100 years to look nothing like those of the last 100 years,” writes Murphy.
Growing toxic debt load
That reality now seems to be unfolding on a global scale. The trouble really became apparent when oil prices leapt beyond $90 a barrel in 2010 and remained at unprecedented highs for four years. These high prices, in turn, put recessionary pressures on the global economy. Costly oil forced people, nations and firms to scale back and put on the brakes.
Meanwhile, Big Oil continued to borrow billions to extract difficult and unconventional hydrocarbons such as deep-sea oil, bitumen and shale oil. All required more capital and more energy to pull out of the ground.
In 2000, companies spent $400 billion a year chasing hydrocarbons. But by 2013 they were spending nearly $900 billion with little change in production.
The lenders and banks ignored the toxic debt and pretended it was business as usual. They poured money into shale gas and bitumen mining like gamblers at a casino.
Goldman Sachs now reckons more than half of the oil companies listed on the stock market spend five times more than what they did a decade ago chasing extreme hydrocarbons. As a consequence, they need an oil price of $120 a barrel to remain cash neutral in the future. In the process, they drove down the price of oil to $30.
In 2014, federal energy bean counters in the U.S. revealed that the energy industry was actually spending more than it was earning. The U.S. Energy Administration reported 127 of the largest oil and gas firms generated $568 billion in cash from their operations during 2013-2014, while their expenses totaled $677 billion. To cover the difference of $110 billion, the energy giants increased their debt load or sold off assets.
Given that the gap between earned cash and spending stood at a modest $10 billion in 2010, that’s a significant change for the industry as well as the global economy it fuels. Since then, the toxic debt load has grown larger.
Wood Mackenzie, an oil consultancy, now estimates that 2.2 million barrels a day of Canadian production is unprofitable with oil at US$35 a barrel, and most of that debt-inviting extraction is coming from the high cost and complex oilsands.
According to Berman, a consummate oilman and analyst, the shale and bitumen fairy tale is ending badly: “Cheap stupid money, because of artificially low interest rates, resulted in over-investment in oil as well as lots of other commodities.
“Over-investment led to over-production and eventually over-production swamped the market with too much supply and the price has to go down until we work our way through the excess supply.”
Today, the majority of shale oil extractors in the U.S. and bitumen miners in Alberta are losing money. “Nobody can break even at less than about $45 a barrel, and that’s just reality,” Berman says. “But everyone keeps on producing to generate some income to pay back their lenders.”
And so oil prices stay in the doldrums, as companies pump costly, unconventional oil to service their debt.
‘All economies have finite lifetimes’
The recent collapse of oil prices has also turned economic theory on its head. After oil prices rise, economies tend to shrink and go into recession. But when they fall, economies are supposed to roar again as things get cheaper and wages go farther.
That’s not happening this time. The global economy is stagnating or shrinking, and energy demand, a big determinant of commerce and GDP, is slowing or going nowhere. In previous price downfalls, cheap oil has pumped up demand. That’s not happening now.
Gail Tverberg, an accountant and energy blogger, has an interesting theory about all this.
She believes that “all economies have finite lifetimes, just as humans, animals, plants and hurricanes do.” She thinks that we may be “in the unfortunate position of observing the end of our economy’s lifetime.”
A senior Ikea executive, Steve Howard, recently acknowledged the possibility: “If we look on a global basis, in the West we have probably hit peak stuff. We talk about peak oil. I’d say we’ve hit peak red meat, peak sugar, peak stuff… peak home furnishings.”
Economists used to believe that when societies peaked, prices would rise, and energy products would become scarce. But Tverberg reckons the networked economy won’t necessarily behave that way. “High energy prices tend to lead to recession, bringing down prices. Low wages and slow growth in debt also tend to bring down prices. A networked economy can work in ways that does not match our intuition; this is why many researchers fail to understand the nature of the problem we are facing.”
She adds that high oil prices expertly disguised the brutal reality of diminishing returns. Whenever an industry or society blows up the principles of efficiency by getting on a treadmill with no efficiency or gain in energy returns, there is no growth. But there is stagnation and political unrest.
Tverberg worries about toxic debt loads, too. As energy gets more expensive (and renewables are expensive and fossil fuel dependent, too), society has to borrow more money to keep a global clunker on the road. Tverberg notes that you can only dial up the debt for so long before you “discover that debt growth has a lot of adverse effects. And one of the big ones is that it tends to funnel money to the wealthier class and take money away from the poor members of society.”
A peak world and complex society faces a conundrum: high oil prices shrink the economy while low oil prices destabilize it due to diminishing energy returns.
There may be some temporary solutions, but they involve ending cheap credit, shutting in at least a million barrels of oil, and regulating the price of oil as the Railroad Commission did in the 1930s. But our politicians cling to the myth of constant growth and have no idea what the real problem is.
“Things aren’t working out the way we had hoped,” explains Tverberg in one of her insightful blogs. “We can’t seem to get oil supply and demand in balance. If prices are high, oil companies can extract a lot of oil, but consumers can’t afford the products that use it, such as homes and cars; if oil prices are low, oil companies try to continue to extract oil, but soon develop financial problems.” The lesson? Expect more volatility not just in oil prices, but financial markets and political institutions. Expect more debt and economic contraction. The commodity that destabilized the climate will not let go of its grip on the global economy without many convulsions. We are in full energy transition without a guide.
Diminishing returns, just like rising expectations, do not bring out the best in people: expect violent reactions and revolutions in petro-states and indebted nations. Expect the unexpected and a narrative of volatility.
“Unfortunately, what we are facing now is a predicament, rather than a problem,” reflects Tverberg. “There is quite likely no good solution. This is a worry.”
40 Comments on "Why the Wild Descent of Oil Is Cause for Concern"
rockman on Mon, 8th Feb 2016 6:12 am
Interesting piece. But the diminishing returns in the oil patch are nothing new. The Rockman had witnessed that phenomenon since his first day at Mobil Oil over 40 years ago. It was called “PO” when the Rockman began: I was called the reserve replacement problem. But it’s the same animal by another name. There have been ups and down along the path but the ultimate trajectory is still the same as it was more than 4 decades ago.
Davy on Mon, 8th Feb 2016 6:29 am
We truly are in a world of diminishing returns that is tipping into the next step of decay. This is both energy related and economically related. It is reflected in our natural world with the ecosystem in global decline and local failures. Climate can now be argued to be in the beginnings of an abrupt change from our uncontrollable actions.
World population continues to expand in the above described environment. We need to be slowing growth of consumption and population but our global system is constructed on a growth based paradigm. That is our catch 22. This catch 22 is the dramatic overt expression of diminishing returns. It means entropy is winning the battle between growth and decay.
Systematically we have extended ourselves far past an adjustment point. There is no adjustment point anymore because we have tipped over into descent in a macro sense. We are so far into the excesses of globalism with its just-in-time dispersed production and consumption we can’t change. Our drive for comparative advantage and maximization of efficiency in the pursuit of profit growth at all cost has left us in a trap.
Our trap is a world of delocalized locals. Locals that cannot survive without resupply from a global world itself subject to minimum operating levels. A global world reliant on far too many dispersed interconnected locals of which we have far too many laws of the minimum in play. These locals with vital connections facing failures causing “laws of the minimum” contagions.
Globalism has been resilient and supported growth because it was the last growth option. Globalism has reached limits of growth and is now in catch 22 of the decay from diminishing returns. All those locals that are vital to the myriad of supply and financial chains that hold globalism together are now approaching a minimum operating level breaking point. Confidence is liquidity and in a globalized world that must have massive liquidity that is terrifying.
Our confidence in a vast network of globalized delocalized locals can turn off suddenly without restart. A Minsky Moment lasting more than a few weeks could be deadly. Confidence is what we really need to worry about. Will you trade your wealth for someone’s promise to pay? How long will you work with the promise to be paid. How long will you go without food resupply before you get desperate?
Currently we are at or near peak everything. Peak everything means we can cannibalize our global construction without real growth. Bad debt in the form of malinvestment, overcapacity, and bad development is growth but not real growth. It is part of the catch 22 trap of diminishing returns at limits of growth. We are forced to grow because of momentum of a species in overshoot. If we don’t grow we starve. That is the nature of a globalized world that is in overshoot to carrying capacity that must continue the overshoot or die.
Our growth is destroying our base for growth. We are at the point where the yeast is eating itself. This can play out for some time as long as confidence holds. Our oil situation is deteriorating but we can ride down the energy gradient of demand and supply destruction a while longer. We have a vast world to cannibalize and further destroy in malinvestment. We are building and consuming things just to keep this broken system going.
A resilient and sustainable economic system would be adapting and adjusting. We can’t do this because we are caught in a trap. If confidence holds, which is most manifested in our financial system, we can tick on for a time. We have enough oil for a few years. Our multi-polar world of economically interconnected but ideologically adversarial nations seem to be stalemated. If the stalemate avoids a global ending war we may find a few more years of this madness. We are at a tipping point that will play out over a time frame not of our making. This is a systematic tipping point of no return. All you can do is adjust locally as best you can because the system is fated to collapse.
paulo1 on Mon, 8th Feb 2016 8:09 am
re: “Take fracking for example. The unpredictable technology”….
I think the technology is quite predictable and well established or the companies wouldn’t be doing it. It also works. Maybe too well, but it works.
Davy on Mon, 8th Feb 2016 8:42 am
A bellwether oil service co hinting the big “B”
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-02-08/chesapeake-plummets-over-20-report-it-has-hired-bankruptcy-attorneys
sidzepp on Mon, 8th Feb 2016 8:54 am
Utilization of resources + population growth = Increase in GDP. As the population of the world increases to unmanageable levels and more strains are put on the economies, governments and the environment, various factions of the world become more conservative and look for scapegoats to blame for the failures of the modern economic systems. As long as humanity desperately clings on to failed political and economic models that fail to address the major problems we all face we are doomed to war, famines and who knows what else is in our future. People want to preserve what they have assuming that it will last forever, or at least their lifelines. Thus the popularity of extreme politicians who utilize fear mongering to marshal their supporters.
ghung on Mon, 8th Feb 2016 8:55 am
Paulo; “I think the technology is quite predictable…”
Sort of like an enema. You never know how much chit you’ll get out.
twocats on Mon, 8th Feb 2016 9:03 am
A bellwether oil service co hinting the big “B” [davy]
that was the article that caught my eye (that crazy zerohedge with their sourced articles). What I find strange is that Chesapeake is supposedly a stronger member of the group. It wasn’t even on the list of ‘most-levered’ companies, supposedly has strong assets and strong balance sheet. Maybe they are fishing for an acquisition offer?
twocats on Mon, 8th Feb 2016 9:09 am
Wood Mackenzie, an oil consultancy, now estimates that 2.2 million barrels a day of Canadian production is unprofitable with oil at US$35 a barrel, and most of that debt-inviting extraction is coming from the high cost and complex oilsands. [article]
So we should be seeing Canadian production dropping off by 2.2 million barrels (or at least a million?) any day now. NO ONE HAS EVER EVER EVER pumped a single barrel of oil at a loss, that’s completely insane I’d rather shoot my wife then myself before doing that! /sarc Someone please tell us again about those 100% rational business-gods that are oil patch companies….
danny on Mon, 8th Feb 2016 9:25 am
First of all Ghung can you keep your private habits to yourself?..your anal fixations are not newsworthy…get outside and quit jacking off so much….
I think people need to watch the movie Dr. Zhivago for how this will all play out…not exactly but very similar.
ghung on Mon, 8th Feb 2016 9:55 am
Gosh, Danny, I’ve never done any fracking. Don’t expect to.
ghung on Mon, 8th Feb 2016 10:16 am
Yeah, Davy, Chesapeake currently down over 50% this morning. Looks like their pooch is screwed.
Dredd on Mon, 8th Feb 2016 10:19 am
“Why the Wild Descent of Oil Is Cause for Concern”
It is a big cause for concern to Oil-Qaeda because they do not like to experience what the hoi polloi have to experience (Epigovernment: The New Model – 11).
Davy on Mon, 8th Feb 2016 12:40 pm
Which banks have the ugliest potential at the moment? Not where you might think:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-02-08/forget-europe-why-time-has-come-panic-about-canadian-banks-one-chart
rockman on Mon, 8th Feb 2016 12:47 pm
cat – I wonder how many folks know that the first 1 mm bopd rom the Alberta oil sands was developed when oil was selling for $30/bbl…or less?
“…now estimates that 2.2 million barrels a day of Canadian production is unprofitable with oil at US$35 a barrel”. I’ll assume what they are saying is that if those CHK wells producing 2.2 mm bopd were drilled today they wouldn’t be profitable. But those wells aren’t being drilled today…they were drilled years ago and much of their production was sold at much higher oil prices. That statement seems to want to imply that CHK is producing those 2.2 mm bopd at a negative cash flow which is obviously be bullsh*t. LOL. For far this writer knows that 2.2 mm bopd came from wells that have collectively recovered 100% of their initial investment and every bbl produced today is “profit”. Perhaps not as much profit as when oil was $90/bbl but still a profit. A little common sense is needed: if CHK were losing $5/bbl for all those 2.2 mm bopd they would be running a negative cash flow $4 BILLION PER YEAR just on those wells alone. Does anyone here believe that?
None of wish argues that CHK isn’t in terrible financial shape. But that seems to be more related to the huge debt they took on in an effort to expand production too quickly.
Davy on Mon, 8th Feb 2016 1:18 pm
US markets are awful today Nasdaq -3.26%, SP -2.56%, DOW -2.36%. VIX is up 17% at 27.32.
marmico on Mon, 8th Feb 2016 1:29 pm
North America is a Fossil Fuel Fortress (FFF).
Self sufficient in coal and natural gas. Minor increases in production and declines in consumption takes care of petroleum.
All the peak oil angst is just bull shit.
Apneaman on Mon, 8th Feb 2016 1:31 pm
marmi’s brain is a Fact Free Fortress (FFF)
twocats on Mon, 8th Feb 2016 1:35 pm
I’ll assume what they are saying is that if those CHK wells producing 2.2 mm bopd were drilled today they wouldn’t be profitable. [rock]
well, you can make that assumption, and I don’t have access to Woods Mackenzie data, but that would mean that writer is either misinterpreting the Woods Mackenzie data or has misspoken, because that’s not what that phrase means.
And if you want to see more evidence that there is a huge amount of denial and can-kicking going on, check out the loan loss reserves of canadian banks (they don’t invest in oil and gas ever, so its not a huge deal):
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-02-08/forget-europe-why-time-has-come-panic-about-canadian-banks-one-chart
twocats on Mon, 8th Feb 2016 1:37 pm
One other point, I’ve seen lots of pictures of Alberta oil sands and I didn’t see a lot of drilling going on. I saw a lot of excavating. Is there another Alberta I don’t know about?
Apneaman on Mon, 8th Feb 2016 1:57 pm
twocats, yes and they don’t even live in igloos anymore.
Energy company halts operations after earthquake in Alberta fracking zone
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/alberta/magnitude-45-earthquake-reported-in-alberta-fracking-zone/article28130435/
100 years of Alberta oil: How an industry was born
http://business.financialpost.com/news/energy/100-years-of-alberta-oil-how-an-industry-was-born
marmico on Mon, 8th Feb 2016 2:14 pm
The non-peaker FFF is more factual than other peaker acronyms like your “$29.99 on special” fuctard favorite ETP or the dumbass Brown’s ELM. Both peaker acronyms have been falsified.
Apneaman on Mon, 8th Feb 2016 2:23 pm
Falsified? By whom? The sock puppet/true believer army? You’re the biggest fuctard ever. A piece of undigested corn in the last good shit I took.
Apneaman on Mon, 8th Feb 2016 2:27 pm
marmi-nony, planty, boat and the rest of the retard corny crew – here’s what they will look like shortly after TSHTF and they realize it ain’t never coming back.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ikzp1xyFtzg
marmico on Mon, 8th Feb 2016 2:38 pm
Me. The ETP was falsified by its own author in his own words and the ELM was falsified by its own author in his own own words at the 95% confidence interval.
The difference being that the ETP author didn’t have a confidence interval. That is why he is a fuctard.
Make certain that you shit out the ETP and ELM after your corn on the cob meal.
Sign up with Davy Greenacres and tiny brain GreggieTee and dig prepper fence holes for 20 years to deposit your FFF lower intestine waste.
shortonoil on Mon, 8th Feb 2016 2:42 pm
“And if you want to see more evidence that there is a huge amount of denial and can-kicking going on, check out the loan loss reserves of canadian banks (they don’t invest in oil and gas ever, so its not a huge deal):”
Denial wins almost every time; it’s easier than putting together a Plan B.
Truth Has A Liberal Bias on Mon, 8th Feb 2016 2:45 pm
Count down to collapse
http://youtu.be/ztgz-QOOrs8
Apneaman on Mon, 8th Feb 2016 3:05 pm
marmi, 20 years? I already told you, you’ll be dead in 20 years.
marmico on Mon, 8th Feb 2016 3:23 pm
Get on out to tiny brain GreggieTee’s doomstead. At the most it’s 10 liters of gasoline. I’ll front you the 15 bucks for the drive. Dig fence holes and shit in them for the next 20 years while FFF passes you by.
You may be right about your actuarial life expectancy. You could pass out permanently after consuming the bulk of tiny brain GreggieTee’s hydroponic weed operation.
Apneaman on Mon, 8th Feb 2016 3:47 pm
marmi, there will always be FF’s, I have never said otherwise. There just won’t be the techno industrial civilization you were indoctrinated into. All civilizations go bye bye eventually even though they all think they are immune and indispensable – your turn. Be more to go around once the great ape dying starts. I agree with short in part that it will be small local operators. Very small and crude I imagine and the coal too. Steam power will come back to some degree. Eventually there will be zero environmental regulations. You won’t need your gym membership since all your time will be spent surviving. The final test of your fitness.
Don’t need a chemical engineering degree to refine some hydrocarbons.
Crude Living on Oil in Syria
“Locals desperate to survive through the civil war in a frontline village northeast Syria set up homemade oil refineries to make a living on crude oil, exposing themselves and the environment to toxic fumes.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3Z97TksiZk
DIY illegal oil refinery in the Niger delta
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4nYd4KSec8
marmico on Mon, 8th Feb 2016 4:13 pm
Don’t need a chemical engineering degree to refine some hydrocarbons
What a fuctard. Like some Wasted Washed up Welder (WWW) can run a refinery? FFF reigns supreme over a WWW. Go shit in a fence post hole.
Truth Has A Liberal Bias on Mon, 8th Feb 2016 4:26 pm
Nony-Marm needs to get laid. If they’ll let you.
Apneaman on Mon, 8th Feb 2016 5:16 pm
I’m a journeyman rigger & fitter marmi who also knows how to monkey weld and a bunch of other practical shit. What can you do besides read the auguries from all the graphs flying around the intertubes? Fuck all, which is why you are terrified of the future you know is almost here for most everyone. If you gots a purdy mouth you may find employment as a 1%er cocksucker.
I mean literally not figuratively like you been doing your whole life. All you’ll need is a pair of knee pads for the transition.
marmico on Mon, 8th Feb 2016 5:23 pm
Let the FFF trade 3 quads of coal and 2 quads of natural gas for 5 quads of petroleum, while ape boy shits in a fence post hole aggregating doom porn.
Apneaman on Mon, 8th Feb 2016 5:49 pm
marmi, I’ll let you blow me everyday so you don’t starve…….cause I care.
shortonoil on Mon, 8th Feb 2016 5:53 pm
“What a fuctard. Like some Wasted Washed up Welder (WWW) can run a refinery? FFF reigns supreme over aWWW. Go shit in a fence post hole.”
Well, actually a WWW could easily run a simple refinery. Samuel M. Kier developed the first refinery process in the US in the 1840’s. Here is a rather interesting article on its early development.
http://www.oil150.com/files/refining-crude-oil-history,-process-and-products.pdf
We realize that as a dedicated, and loving son that you are working diligently (at 5 cents a post) to help pay for your mother’s very badly needed hemorrhoid operation. Such dedication is truly commendable. However, many who prowl these erudite pages of learning are rather at a loss to explain how the opinion of an obviously inbred troglodyte could be taken seriously by anyone? If you could please elucidate us on this matter it would be greatly appreciated.
The readership
Apneaman on Mon, 8th Feb 2016 5:55 pm
marmi, how’s that economy working out in 3rd world America? Not looking to good.
Your new neighbours.
The Resurrection of America’s Slums
After falling in the 1990s, the number of poor people living in high-poverty areas has been growing fast.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/08/more-americans-are-living-in-slums/400832/?utm_source=SFFB
marmi, find us a chart or graph that disproves the new reality. These growing slums and decaying infrastructure do not exist because of this line on this graph. These people are just part of yet another liberal hoax/plot.
Apneaman on Mon, 8th Feb 2016 6:09 pm
Chesapeake Energy stock drops as financial fears mount
Shares lose a third of value following bond selloff, restructuring report
Oklahoma City natural gas producer says it has no current plans to file for bankruptcy
Company faces raft of lawsuits in Tarrant County over royalty payments
Read more here: http://www.star-telegram.com/news/business/article59117818.html#storylink=cpy
marmico on Mon, 8th Feb 2016 6:29 pm
FFF rules. BW Hill’s ETP or JJ Brown’s ELM ain’t ever going to wiggle an algorithm out of that fact.
Plus, the U.S. DOD fly boys/girls, who are quite efficient in jet fuel consumption, ain’t ever going to allow a trade partner to wiggle out of FFF presidential executive order petroleum contract.
Northwest Resident on Mon, 8th Feb 2016 6:53 pm
marmico is just here to provide comic relief and act the fool. Nothing he fabricates or asserts can be taken seriously — every word marmico writes on this forum is for shits and giggles and pure ass-hattery. So cut the obnoxious clown a little slack as flails and flagellates himself with the stupid stick — he’s just trying to get a few laughs.
makati1 on Mon, 8th Feb 2016 6:56 pm
Capitalism is in the ICU and NOT going to recover. It could only exist when there was plentiful, cheap energy (oil) to power it like many other things these days. Those counting on their ‘investments’, 401Ks, mutual funds, retirement plans, insurance policies, Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, savings accounts, home equity, etc. to provide for their future, are only kidding themselves. If you are not giving thought and action to real preps, you will be among the ‘missing’.