Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Malaysia and Indonesia appear headed towards a territorial dispute, with their national oil companies laying claim to potentially rich offshore oil-and-gas blocks off Borneo island.
Malaysia has said it was ready to contest any overlapping claim to the area. Petronas, Malaysia’s national oil company, said that it “was in advance stages of awarding the ultra-deepwater blocks… which are within the Malaysian territorial boundary”.
$50 or $60 a barrel oil is still affordable by western standards, but surely debilitating for growing economies What if it hits $80, or even $100 by estimates of pessimists?
China’s need for oil has led it to West Africa’s oil fields in the Gulf of Guinea, and to Central Africa, where oil production in several countries is also coming on line.
In the face of record high oil prices, Germany and Britain are expected at the G7 meeting on Friday in Washington to propose measures to make world oil markets more transparent.
The Philippine presidential palace Wednesday said it is imperative to cut the Philippine dependency on oil to lessen impacts of oil price hikes on citizen’s lives.
It may have come as a surprise to many (particularly market analysts) that the price of oil didn’t just magically stop at US$40 a barrel. As we push beyond the $50 per barrel barrier the G-7 finance leaders seem to have given up demanding the impossible – that OPEC deliver oil at $30 a barrel or less.
The world’s oil refiners are unimpressed by Saudi Arabia’s boost to production capacity that would only swell supplies of sour, high-sulfur crude while they hanker for sweet oil.
OPEC producers insist there is no shortage of oil despite record prices and although plenty of heavy crude is available, refineries are thirsty for light sweet crude which is in shorter supply, analysts say.
David Goodstein, the Caltech professor of physics and applied physics, who remembered all too well the upheaval caused by short-term oil crises in 1973 and 1979, immediately began to wonder how an ill-prepared world would cope with an irreversible fuel shortage in the near future. The self-evident answer: Not very well.
Adaptation of a talk by Caltech vice provost and professor of physics and applied physics David Goodstein, author of Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil (W. W. Norton) // Sidebars on global warming and on Goodstein are included.
TEN years ago China was a net oil exporter. Today it is the world’s third largest oil importer, behind the USA and Japan, and the second largest oil consumer. Ten years ago China produced around 250,000 cars per year. Last year the country churned out more than three million. Committed factory expansions and developments will take capacity to five million cars next year.
Crude oil futures hit $US50 in electronic after-hours trade in New York, setting a new record as supply worries intensified.
