Can anyone comment on the apparent oil glut right now? I had assumed that the low price was the work of Saudis wanting to bankrupt the frackers in the USA, but it seems that the low prices are lasting a lot longer than I had expected.
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Oil Glut (7 posts)
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Posted 8 years ago #
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My mildly educated guess is that prices were high enough to motivate heavy investment in alternative energy and that dropping some profits and bonuses was necessary to keep the industry solvent for a bit longer.
Posted 8 years ago # -
Alternative energy (nice as it is) hasn't had any role in this.
Deflation is a hard concept to understand (I understand it less the more I read about it).
Oil fracking has probably peaked, more due to geology than low prices.
Some of the shale gas fracking regions have peaked, some have not yet.
Conventional nat. gas is in sharp decline, something that people who live in cold cities (NYC, Chicago, Boston, etc) might want to pay attention to.
Fracking delayed energy rationing.
Posted 8 years ago # -
Gasoline prices headed toward $1.00
Posted 8 years ago # -
Peak oil losing credibility as renewables shift accelerates
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-12-24/peak-oil-los...
With the world awash with too much crude oil at the moment, the fear of an economic catastrophe when fossil fuels start running out is quietly fading in the background.
The prediction is known as peak oil — what happens when crude oil extraction hits its maximum and supplies begin a steady and permanent decline creating a global shock.
But now the peak oil argument is fast losing currency as global supplies of oil vastly outstrip demand, pushing the US benchmark price toward 30 US dollars a barrel.
Shane Oliver, chief economist at AMP Capital Investors, said the supply and demand table has well and truly turned on the once vocal peak oil advocates.
"They've been talking about a peak in the global production of oil for the last two decades now and it still hasn't happened, and I think the reality is that they are going to remain wrong going forward," Dr Oliver told the ABC's AM program.
Posted 8 years ago # -
Just because oil prices are low and there is a glut in supply doesn't mean all the peak oil activists are wrong. But many of them have been wrong about their timelines and consequences. Dire prognostications often end up killing the credibility of a certain analyses.
If the peak oil people actually are wrong, in that the peak will not happen anytime soon, or that it will be usurped by another crisis, then many people who dedicated time to understanding the phenomenon and took stock in it, will be less likely to believe in anything next time. As with "Limits to Growth," there is a risk in making precise predictions for such macro scale systems. Perhaps being 10, 20, or 100 years off isn't that big of a deal in scientific terms, but in human lifespan terms, it's huge.
I see a generalized apathy spreading over many activists who felt an intense urgency about 10 years ago, myself included. This has something to do with Obama and the fact that life has been relatively calm here inside the empire since 2008.
Of course, the system could collapse at any point, due to a number of risks, and perhaps all the doomers will be redeemed sometime soon.
Posted 8 years ago # -
Perhaps the Saudis want to discredit the Peak Oil thesis because they're feeling the pressure of the potential redaction of the 28 pages. So they are undertaking great sacrifices by indulging low prices to give the impression that there is a vast supply.
Posted 8 years ago #
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