[clif]

My reply was to his less than gracious retort to your post.

[ROCKMAN]

"This is because increasingly stringent climate policies will require around half of known fossil fuels to stay in the ground". No policy, if not enforceable, will ever keep a bbl of oil or a sniff of gas in the ground. Right now normal market forces are doing just that...not any environmental movement. Notice the points made are about FUTURE HYDROCARBON DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS...not a word about curtailing any current production.

[Graeme]

Plummeting oil price casts shadow over fracking's future

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')here’s no doubt that US-based fracking – the process through which oil and gas deposits are blasted from shale deposits deep underground – has caused a revolution in worldwide energy supplies.

Yet now the alarm bells are ringing about the financial health of the fracking industry, with talk of a mighty monetary bubble bursting − leading to turmoil on the international markets similar to that in 2008.

In many ways, it’s a straightforward case of supply and demand. Due to the US fracking boom, world oil supply has increased.

But with global economic growth now slowing – the drop in growth in China is particularly significant – there’s a lack of demand and a glut in supplies, leading to a fall in price of nearly 50% over the last six months.

Fracking has become a victim of its own success. The industry in the US has grown very fast. In 2008, US oil production was running at five million barrels a day. Thanks to fracking, that figure has nearly doubled, with talk of US energy self-sufficiency and the country becoming the world’s biggest oil producer – “the new Saudi Arabia” – in the near future.


There are now fears that many fracking operations may default on an estimated $200bn of borrowings, raised mainly through bonds issued on Wall Street and in the City of London.

In turn, this could lead to a collapse in global financial markets similar to the 2008 crash.

There are also questions about just how big existing shale oil and gas reserves are, and how long they will last. A recent report by the Post Carbon Institute, a not-for-profit thinktank based in the US, says reserves are likely to peak and fall off rapidly, far sooner than the industry’s backers predict.

[dohboi]

Al Gore: oil companies 'use our atmosphere as an open sewer'

We must leave fossil fuels unburned, Gore says, adding the transition to clean energy will be ‘unstoppable’

http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable- ... ate-change

[Graeme]

Drillers on brink of collapse: Oil companies are looking at ‘outright liquidations’, U.S. oil supplies hit highest level in 80 years.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he carnage from low oil prices is about to get even uglier.

Conway McKenzie, the largest restructuring firm in the US, says that oil drillers will begin shutting down as soon as the second quarter, followed closely by explorers, according to Bloomberg’s Joe Carroll.

The game changed when on January 5, crude broke $50 per barrel for the first time since April 2009 when the economy was in recession. Here’s what Conway’s John T. Young told Bloomberg:

“When I saw WTI hit $65, I thought we’re going to be really busy with restructurings … When it hit the $40s, I knew we were looking at outright liquidations.”


Oil drillers will begin collapsing under the weight of lower crude prices during the second quarter and energy explorers who employ them will shortly follow, according to Conway Mackenzie Inc., the largest U.S. restructuring firm.

Companies that drill wells and manage fields on behalf of oil producers will be the first to fall after the benchmark American crude, West Texas Intermediate, lost 57 percent of its value in seven months, said John T. Young, whose firm led the city of Detroit through its 2013 bankruptcy.

Oil companies have slashed thousands of jobs, delayed billions of dollars in projects and dropped or scaled back expansion plans in response to the prolonged rout in crude prices. For oilfield service providers that test wells and line the holes with steel and cement, the impact of price reductions forced upon them by explorers will start to pinch hard during the second quarter, Young said Thursday