Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
From this week’s Barron’s, the influential US financial weekly, a measure of
the concern about the “entirely different” and “unprecedented” energy crisis
which “should have a severe impact, be global in scope, and be difficult to
solve”. Maxwell, dubbed by the magazine as the “dean of energy analysts”,
subscribes to the Hubbert’s Curve theory of depleting oil resources.
World oil supplies are all but certain to remain tight through the rest of this decade, unless
there is a precipitous drop in demand, according to the results of a study by the London-based
Oil Depletion Analysis Centre (ODAC).
The US Interior Department on Friday gave final approval to a plan by ConocoPhillips and partner Anadarko Petroleum Corp. to develop five tracts around the oil-rich Alpine field on Alaska’s North Slope.
It’s too early to celebrate the recent decline in oil prices after they topped $55 a barrel. None of the reasons that created the price spike — the strong thirst for crude in China and India, the dismemberment of the Russian oil giant Yukos, the terror strikes against oil facilities in the Middle East — has gone away.
Russian oil companies are less interested in unexplored deposits and are not drilling new wells.
SABOTEURS have set fire to four oil wells in Iraq’s northern fields.
Successive explosions had rocked the four wells in Khabbaza, 20km northwest of Kirkuk, the state-run Northern Oil Co said today.
Russia’s economic gold reserves will be exhausted in 2011, Natural Resources Minister Yury Trutnev said at a government meeting. According to Mr Trutnev, commercially exploitable reserves of some minerals are close to exhaustion. In particular, he said the country’s exploitable reserves of oil, uranium, copper and vein gold would be exhausted in 2015.
China, the world’s second-largest consumer of oil after the United States, has plenty of cash to secure sources of petroleum and natural gas. But as aggressively as any nation, it is also cutting deals and forging alliances to get the energy it needs.
China, the world’s second-largest consumer of oil after the United States, has plenty of cash to secure sources of petroleum and natural gas. But as aggressively as any nation, it is also cutting deals and forging alliances to get the energy it needs.
A team of market forecasters that correctly predicted the oil bust of the 1980s thinks history will not repeat itself, at least for now. “I think the real key is the peaking of world oil production,” said Groppe, a partner with Groppe, Long & Littell, who has consulted the industry for a half century.
Low heating fuel stocks in all major consuming regions could reverse oil’s slide from record highs, as refiners struggle to build a supply cushion for peak winter demand.
Recent news about the situation in the Russian oil sector has been largely confined to two or three major oil companies. The Yukos saga has dominated, but there are other trends in the Russian oil sector that influence the country’s economy.
