Category: Peak Oil

Eddie Seal for The Wall Street Journal Citigroup Inc.’s Ed Morse was the analyst who prominently called $75-a-barrel global oil prices last March, back when it was trading above $100 a barrel and prevailing wisdom had prices rising rather than falling. He was right, of course – Brent crude plummeted through that threshold in late November and has continued to fall, to $53 and change Monday . As such, oil-market watchers tend to listen to what he has to say. And what is his outlook for the foreseeable future? Look out below. Mr. Morse and his team at Citigroup have cut their estimate for global oil prices to average $63 a barrel in 2015, down from $80, and for the U.S. benchmark to average $55 a barrel this year (just FYI, Nymex prices briefly traded below $50 a barrel earlier Monday). They see a confluence of factors — including […]

Click here to view full article at blogs.wsj.com

With all the conspiracy theories surrounding OPEC’s November decision not cut production, is it really not just a case of simple economics? The U.S. shale boom has seen huge hype but the numbers speak for themselves and such overflowing optimism may have been unwarranted. When discussing harsh truths in energy, no sector is in greater need of a reality check than renewable energy. In a third exclusive interview with James Stafford of Oilprice.com , energy expert Arthur Berman explores: • How the oil price situation came about and what was really behind OPEC’s decision • What the future really holds in store for U.S. shale • Why the U.S. oil exports debate is nonsensical for many reasons • What lessons can be learnt from the U.S. shale boom • Why technology doesn’t have as much of an influence on oil prices as you might think • How the global […]

Click here to view full article at peakoil.com

Longtime readers of the site and listeners to the show will know that the founder of Financial Sense, Jim Puplava, has been a regular proponent of peak oil since 2002, when oil prices were trading around $20/barrel. Now that oil has fallen in half from its $100+ range in place over the past few years, many have written us wondering if Jim has changed his views. That is, is peak oil now dead? In last Saturday’s Big Picture, Jim goes “on the record” by saying no, he doesn’t think peak oil is dead, though it has clearly been pushed out further with the massive increase in US shale production and deceleration of global economic growth. This, and the unwinding of massive long positions in the crude oil market, have likely exacerbated the downtrend and led to momentum selling. Though oil could move lower and possibly reach the low end […]

Click here to view full article at peakoil.com

The decision by president Barack Obama to open the door to US oil exports seeped out of Washington in a low-key manner last week, but the impact could be as explosive as a New Year’s Eve firework display. The ban – imposed after the Middle East oil embargoes in the 1970s – has made it close to impossible to ship abroad the fruits of America’s shale bonanza. It also long looked wrong-headed in the home of free trade. The US department of commerce quietly overturned the four-decade-old policy by saying it had started to approve a backlog of requests to sell processed light oil to foreign buyers. The issue is tremendously sensitive, which is possibly why the announcement came out at a time of year when most policymakers were still at home enjoying the Christmas holidays with their families. Many manufacturers and many domestic consumers are totally opposed to […]

Click here to view full article at www.theguardian.com

Peak Oil from the Demand Side: A Prophetic New Model This is a Guest post by Avery Morrow Avery Morrow’s Internet Fancy The most attention-grabbing attempts to predict oil futures have come from geologists and environmental activists, who tend to look solely at production. An overlooked doctoral thesis by Christophe McGlade, Uncertainties in the outlook for oil and gas , in contrast, focuses on how both supply and demand might be constrained in the coming decades. Peak oil researchers should take note of McGlade’s thesis because he predicted, in November 2013, that oil prices would sink, and that they will stay low throughout the second half of this decade. I found this paper on Google Scholar and have no connection with the author, but I appreciate his careful consideration of peak oil arguments, and his ability to distance himself from the more narrow-minded aspects of both economic and geological thinking. […]

Click here to view full article at peakoilbarrel.com

ENLARGE An aerial view of Petrobras’ Abreu e Lima oil refinery in Recife, Pernambuco state, Brazil. Agence France-Presse/Getty Images The drops last year in the prices of oil and other commodities are threatening to stunt growth in poor African and Latin American nations that sought to use vast natural-resource wealth to climb the development ladder. During a decadelong boom, governments on those continents vowed to use a windfall from surging raw-material prices to lift the vast underclass. Governments that sought big development leaps by funding social-welfare programs and ambitious infrastructure initiatives, such as building roads, ports and power plants, may now have less money to do so. “The good-governance records in many [Latin American] countries were linked to commodity prices, and this will be tested by the end of the commodity boom,” said Jorge Castaneda, Mexico’s former foreign minister. The commodity-rich nations of Africa and Latin America are also […]

Click here to view full article at www.wsj.com

What in the world? Pieces of global opinion A review of the best commentary on and around the world… Related Stories Today’s must-read Americans have become used to the bouncing cost of oil over recent years. Prices have spiked, causing angst and political posturing ("Drill, baby, drill" and all), and they’ve tanked following the economic upheaval of the Great Recession and the 9/11 attacks. The bottom has again dropped out of the oil market, as the cost per barrel has declined more than 40% since June. The change has been a welcome relief for consumers and energy-intensive industries, for which the change is an unexpected financial windfall. While most have a nagging suspicion that the drop is only temporary and prices will, at some point soon, begin an upward climb, Bloomberg View’s Mohamed A El-Erian isn’t so sure . What the world is currently experiencing is a "fundamental shift" […]

Click here to view full article at www.bbc.com

No one really saw 2014’s dramatic plunge in oil price coming, so it’s probably fair to say that any predictions about where it’s going from here fall somewhere between educated guesses and picking a number out of a hat. In that light, it’s less than shocking to see one analyst making a case—albeit in a pure outlier sense—for a drop all the way below $14 a barrel. Abigail Doolittle , who does business under the name Peak Theories Research, posits that current chart trends point to the possibility that crude has three downside target areas where it could find support—$44, $35 and the nightmare scenario of, yes, $13.65. Make no mistake, she thinks that’s an extreme case. Her target for the more likely move is the $35 range, which in itself is quite a call considering light crude had been just above $100 a barrel this summer and the […]

Click here to view full article at peakoil.com

In the current debate about the  Nature  article  "The Fracking Fallacy,"  the discussion has focused on estimates of cumulative production of shale gas plays by the Energy Information Administration (EIA) and The Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas (UT/BEG).  David Hughes  provides another estimate in his recent post  "Fracking Fracas: The Trouble with Optimistic Shale Gas Projections by the U.S. Department of Energy ," a summary of his comprehensive study of all U.S. shale plays  Drilling Down  published by The Post Carbon Institute. The Fracking Fallacy debate is important because it casts doubt on the reliability of government estimates of our natural gas supply.  If U.S. gas production is in decline by the early 2020s as described in the  Nature  article, or sooner as I suspect, then important policy decisions about the export of natural gas and the retirement of coal-fired electric power plants have been […]

Click here to view full article at www.resilience.org